How to change formatting of all occurrences of an expression in Microsoft Word

That you can use Find and Replace feature in Microsoft Word to replace all occurrences of a word or expression with another word or expression, is a well known fact to regular Microsoft Word users. However, not many people know that Find and Replace feature in Word can also be used for changing the formatting of all occurrences of a word or expression in one command. In fact, you can change the formatting in several ways; for example, change font type, font size, make it bold, or italic, etc., replace with superscript or subscript, change the font color or highlight color, language, style used, etc. All such changes can be made to all occurrences of a word or expression in a single command. It is only up to your imagination and requirements. Microsoft Word’s Find and Replace feature offers versatile functionality in this regard.

For illustration purposes, let us consider the example of this article. I’ve used the expression “Microsoft Word” at several places in the document. After preparing this document, suddenly I realize that I must emphasize this expression at all places in the document wherever it occurs. I want to make it bold and italics. I also want to change its font type from Times New Roman to Arial. Moreover, I want to change its font size from 12 to 14 points and want to change its font color from black to red. One option is to go to all the occurrences of “Microsoft Word” in this document one by one and then change the font type, font size, font color, bold and italics, manually for all such occurrences. But, it is very time consuming and we may commit some mistake at some occurrence. The other option is to use the Find and Replace feature in Microsoft Word to automatically make these changes to all occurrences of this expression in a single command. Second option is very easy and accurate. Let’s see how it can be achieved. This method should work for all versions of Microsoft Word.

(1) Start Microsoft Word. If Word was already running, then close all instances of Word, and start it afresh. This precaution is just to ensure that when we use Find and Replace dialog box later, there is nothing stored in its fields / text boxes from the previous use. This will allow us to make a fresh beginning.

(2) Open your document. Move the cursor to the beginning of the document.

(3) Click on Replace command in the Edit menu. Or else, press Ctrl + H keys together.

(4) The Find and Replace dialog box will appear on the screen. Click on the More button so that it now displays the full size Find and Replace dialog box (including its lower half part); in fact, now the More button will change into Less button. See the following figure:

(5) Now type the word or expression, whose formatting you want to change, in the Find what box. In this illustration we’re using the expression “Microsoft Word” for changing formatting for all its occurrences in the document. Type it exactly as it appears (of course, without the quote marks). There should not be any extra character or even any extra space.

(6) Next, press Tab character to move the cursor to the Replace with box. This will ensure that there is no extra character and that the cursor is at the first position in the Replace with box. Now, type the same expression (in this case, “Microsoft Word”) in the Replace with box, exactly with the same spelling (or the better option is to copy this expression from Find what box by pressing Ctrl + A keys followed by Ctrl + C keys, and then paste it in Replace with box by pressing Ctrl + V keys).

(7) While the focus is still in the Replace with box, click on the Format button at the bottom of the Find and Replace dialog box. A popup menu will appear, as shown below:

(8) Select Font from this popup menu. The Find Font dialog box will appear on the screen. Select font type as Arial, font size as 14, font style as “Bold Italic” and color as red, as we want to change the formatting of our expression in this manner. This dialog box will now appear as under:

(9) Click OK on this Find Font dialog box to close it with the above selected options. Now, the Find and Replace dialog box would appear as under:

If you’ve followed the above steps correctly, the words “Font: Arial, 14 pt, Bold, Italic, Font color: Red” would appear just below the Replace with box. These words show the formatting that will be applied to our expression in all occurrences of the expression.

(10) Now simply click on the Replace All button. And, Word will replace all occurrences of our chosen expression with itself but with a different formatting as selected above. You’ll get a confirmation message about the number of replacements made. You can cross-check that all instances or occurrences of the expression have been replaced with the newly formatted same expression.

That’s it!

Thus, we notice that it is a short-cut method to change the formatting of any expression in all occurrences of a Word document. In fact, in this example, to keep it simple, I’ve used only the Font-related formatting changes. As you can easily see, you can change even other formatting also (such as language, style, etc.), using the same method.

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