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By itself, the Find command is really handy. But its true power lies in its ability to not only find text but also replace that text with something else. It's one of the word processor features that helped put various typewriter companies out of business.
Replacing text is easy. In fact, the only trouble you'll have with the Replace command is its shortcut key.
No, it's not R — the Ctrl+R shortcut command is used to right-align text in a paragraph. (Nice try, though.) Apparently, Microsoft thought that more folks out there would be desperate to right-align paragraphs than who would desire to search and replace.
Okay, just give up now. Every other word you can think of for replace (oust, relieve, substitute, zap) has a shortcut key of its own. So the shortcut key for the Replace command is . . . Ctrl+H!
Enough dallying. Suppose that you want to replace the word pig with pork. Both mean the same thing, but you don't eat pig, you eat pork — well, unless your religion forbids such things, in which case you eat chicken or one of the many delightful vegetarian dishes. Enough!
1. Choose Edit --> Replace.
Or, if you can remember what the Heck H stands for, type Ctrl+H. Honestly.
The Replace part of the Find and Replace dialog box, shown in Figure 1, appears onscreen. This tab is another panel in the Find and Replace dialog box — which makes sense because finding is a big part of find and replace.
Figure 1: The Replace part of the Find and Replace dialog box.
The Find and Replace dialog box also has a More button. If you see the More options, click the Less button if you want your screen look like Figure 1.
2. In the Find What box, type the text you want to find.
This is the text you want to replace with something else.
Press the Tab key when you're done typing.
3. In the Replace With box, type the text you want to use to replace the original text.
4. Ask yourself, "Do I want a chance to change my mind before replacing each bit of found text?"
If so, click the Find Next button (taking this action is usually a good idea). If not, you can click the Replace All button; text is found and replaced automatically, giving you no chance to change your mind.
5. If you click Find Next, Word pauses at each occurrence of the text.
The found text is highlighted onscreen just like in the regular Find task. When this highlighting happens, you can click the Replace button to replace it or click Find Next to skip it and find the next matching bit of text. Click the Cancel button or press the Escape key when you tire of this process.
 | Word may find your text, such as use, in the middle of another word, such as causes. Oops! Click the More button and select the Find Whole Words Only option to prevent that from happening. |
If there's nothing more to replace, Word (or the Office Assistant) lets you know. A summary of how many things were replaced is stated, which is for trivial purposes only. For example, the dog says:
Word has completed its search of the document and has made 9 replacements.
Of course, the number of replacements depends on what you were searching for.
 | - If you don't type anything in the Replace With box . . . oops! Forgetting to type replacement text does not turn the Replace command into the Find command. No, Word just assumes that you want to find the text and replace it with nothing. Yup, that means deleting all the text that's found. This process can be a scary thing, so be sure to click Find Next. Otherwise, you may zap parts of your document and, boy, would you be bummed (until you used the Undo command).
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- Click Find Next most of the time. Only if you're absolutely certain (a rare occurrence, by most standards) should you click Replace All.
 | - The Undo command restores your document to its preceding condition if you foul up the Replace operation.
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