When processing voluminous documents, it is convenient to use not a regular editor, but a full-fledged text processor. The most popular of these, of course, is Microsoft Word. It helps to cope with a wide range of tasks by providing built-in tools for solving them. The Word is not included in the standard delivery of Windows, but for many users these concepts have become inseparable. And although there are analogues on the market, they didn’t come close either in popularity or in functionality to a software product from Microsoft. So one of the first things that a user does after installing Windows is how to install Office.
Sometimes during the editing of the text you need to find all the occurrences of a word and change it to something else. In another program, I would have to read all the text, manually find what I was looking for, erase and type. But this is inconvenient, especially if the text is voluminous, then the Word developers took care of it. There are two ways to find a word and replace it. How exactly - consider it right now.
Working methods
To perform this operation, open the document in Word and set the cursor at its beginning, since the search will occur from its current position. Then you need to go to the “Edit” tab in the Settings ribbon and find the “Find and replace” item there. Clicking this button at the bottom of the screen will open a dialog box. We type in a word or phrase to replace it, in the input field to the right we enter what we need to replace this text with, and press enter. The first entry will be found and replaced, then the program will wait for the next click. This is convenient if you want to decide in each case independently whether to carry out a replacement or not. Then you will have the opportunity to assess the context, perhaps change the decision, skip several occurrences, etc. In case you need to replace all the occurrences at once, and you do not want to evaluate the conditions, you can click on the corresponding button "Replace All". Then each accumulation of characters satisfying the search mask in the text will be replaced with the one you specified in the corresponding input field. As a rule, search with replacement does not cause difficulties, but it is necessary to take into account that it does not respond to the context. That is, the generic endings, singular and plural, and other grammatical and spelling rules will not be taken into account. Therefore, you have a chance to get errors as a result of this action. And the spell checker in Word does not “catch” inconsistencies between inclinations and other stylistic errors of the text, therefore, most likely, it will not emphasize these moments as erroneous. So be careful.
In addition to words, as already mentioned, you can use both phrases and even single characters as a search mask. For example, if you want to find all double spaces in the text and replace them with single ones, then this tool will cope with such a task.
But there is another nuance that needs to be considered. The fact is that the operation of finding and replacing words in Word is not case-sensitive. How this is reflected in practice: if you, for example, search for “phrase” in the text, then the “Phrase” will coincide with the search mask, and that matters. For example, a sentence or paragraph begins with this word, and the substitution will cause a grammatical error. In addition, even the part of the word that matches the mask will be replaced. So the first thing to do after such an operation, if you clicked on “Replace All”, is to run a spell checker, and preferably after that, also run the text yourself, looking for points missed by the Word. So you can reduce the likelihood of errors.
The required dialog box can also be called by a combination of hot keys. In Microsoft Word, this is Ctrl + H, and when you press them at the same time, the same input field will open.
Second way
The described method is suitable when you need to carry out the so-called "direct" replacement. As a rule, most users need just that. But there are times when something more difficult is needed. For example, a word must be found and replaced with another only if it is at the beginning of a phrase, and the next if it is at the end. For such a standard function is not suitable. However, a macro mechanism is built into Microsoft Word. In essence, this is a script in the Visual Basic programming language, and you need to know its syntax in order to write them. With the help of such a powerful tool you can implement both such a “spreading” algorithm and a direct replacement. However, a solution that requires special knowledge cannot be considered generally accepted, so we simply note the presence of such an opportunity, but we will not dwell on it in detail.
Conclusion
Word has a standard “Find and Replace” function that allows you to avoid the monotonous “manual” reading of the text and typing the necessary phrases there. This tool is easy to use, and it will help both to replace the occurrences one by one, and all at once in the text of the document.