

- #Advanced find and replace formatting in word how to#
- #Advanced find and replace formatting in word update#
So what’s the deal with the ) Replace with:

#Advanced find and replace formatting in word how to#
If only you knew how to use wildcard find and replace! But now that deadline is looming, and there’s still a lot of work ahead. Of course, you could always choose to Replace All the multiple spaces.Your anguished cry rings out in the middle of the night: “Why, oh why, did I accept this stupid freelance job?” You know the answer: The client offered you twice as much money as you’d ordinarily get for a job like this because the deadline is tight.

The cursor will automatically move to the next occurence of multiple spaces. To replace these with a hard return, click. The cursor will move to the first set of two or more spaces. To find the first occurence of two or more spaces, click. To activate the “Use wildcards” option, click the checkbox. Without this, we won’t get the results we want. To do this, in the “Replace with” field, type: ^p.īefore this will work, we need to make sure that the “Use wildcards” option is activated. Let’s replace the spaces with a hard return. What do we want to use to replace the multiple spaces? If we’d like to insert a tab, we type: ^t. To find a varying number of spaces, we will use the.

Move to the Replace tab at the top of the dialog box. Open the Find and Replace dialog box by clicking and choosing “Advanced Find…” Now, what about that coworker who tends to separate ideas or lists with several spaces instead of a tab or hard return? How can we find a group of spaces that varies in number? This is just slightly trickier than finding 2 spaces. Of course, you could always choose to Replace All the double spaces.įinding and Replacing a Varying Number of Spaces The cursor will automatically move to the next occurence of two spaces. To replace these with a single space, click. The cursor will move to the first set of two spaces. To find the first occurence of two spaces, click. In the “Replace with” field, type: 1 space.īecause the spaces don’t appear as text, the Find and Replace dialog box will seem to be empty…but it isn’t. To find two spaces, in the “Find what” field, type: 2 spaces. Click the Replace tab at the top of the dialog box. To open the Find and Replace dialog box, on the Ribbon, click: and choose “Advanced Find…” Using Word’s Find and Replace feature, we can easily find these extra spaces and replace them with the formatting of our choice (single space, tab, or hard return). Put a checkmark in the Use wildcards box. Then, right after the space, type this: In the Replace with box, type a single space. (On a Mac, press CMD + h.) In Word’s Find what box, type a single space. Or possibly we have a coworker who likes to separate ideas with several spaces instead of a tab or hard return. Display Word’s Replace dialog by pressing CTRL + h on your keyboard.
#Advanced find and replace formatting in word update#
Perhaps we were taught to put two spaces between sentences and now need to update documents to have only one space. There are several reasons we might need to find and replace spaces in Word.
