How to search for a word in word

Find text in a document

Looking for text in your document? The Find pane helps you find characters, words, and phrases. If you want, you can also replace it with different text.

If you’re in Reading View, switch to Editing View by clicking Edit Document > Edit in Word Web App.

To open the Find pane from the Edit View, press Ctrl+F, or click Home > Find.

Find text by typing it in the Search the document for… box. Word Web App starts searching as soon as you start typing. To further narrow the search results, click the magnifying glass and select one or both of the search options.

Tip: If you don’t see the magnifying glass, click the X at the end of the Search the document for… box. The magnifying glass reappears.

When you type in your document or make a change, Word Web App pauses the search and clears the Find pane. To see the results again, click the Next Search Result or Previous Search Result arrow.

When you’re done searching, click the X at the end of the Search the document for… box.

How to Find a Word in Word

Use the word processor’s search function to locate text and more

What to Know

This article explains how to search for text in Microsoft Word. The information applies to Word 2019, Word 2016, Word 2013, Word 2010, Word Online, and Word for Microsoft 365.

How to Do a Basic Word Search in MS Word

Microsoft Word includes a search function that makes it easy to search for different elements in a document, including text. Use the basic tool to look for instances of a specific word, or the advanced options to perform tasks such as replace all instances of a word with another one or search for equations.

To run a basic search for a specific word or phrase in Word:

Go to the Home tab and select Find, or press Ctrl+F.

In older versions of Microsoft Word, select File > File Search.

In the Navigation pane, enter the text you want to search for. A list of matching words displays in the Navigation pane and instances of the word are highlighted in the main document.

Cycle through the results in the Navigation pane in one of three ways:

Make any changes or edits to the document as needed.

Select the Down arrow to move to the next instance of the word.

Match Case, Whole Words Only, and More

Beyond searching for every instance of a word, you can get more specific about what you want to find. For example, to find whole instances of a word and not every word that contains the letter combination or to find instances of a word that aren’t capitalized.

Here’s how to do an advanced search:

Select Home > Find.

In the Navigation pane, select the Search drop-down arrow.

Choose Options.

In the Find Options dialog box, choose the description that best fits what you’re trying to find. For example, to find instances of a word with the same capitalization, select Match case.

Select OK.

Use Advanced Find

Many of the choices available in the Find Options dialog box are also available in Advanced Find. Advanced Find includes the option to replace the text with something new. Based on your selection, Word replaces one instance or all instances at once. You can also replace the formatting, or change the language, paragraph, and tab settings.

Find Instances of Other Elements

Other options in the Navigation pane include searching for equations, tables, graphics, footnotes, endnotes, and comments.

How to Search for a Word in Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word’s search tools come in a couple of different varieties. The basic search lets you locate specific words or phrases in your document, while the Advanced Find tool lets you do things like match case, use wildcards, and generally find text in most of the ways that you might consider.

You can search for certain words in Microsoft Word by clicking the Home tab, selecting the Find button, then typing your search term into the “Search” field.

This will then highlight each instance of the word that appears in the document, and you can click each of the search results in the Navigation column to jump to the occurrence of that word in your document.

But if you are trying to figure out how to search for a word in Microsoft Word, then you might be struggling to locate the correct tool. Our guide below will show you how to use the search tool in your Word file.

How to Search a Word Document

Our guide continues below with additional information on how to find a word in a document, including pictures of these steps.

How to Search for a Word in a Microsoft Word Document (Guide with Pictures)

The steps in this article were performed in Microsoft Word for Office 365, but will also work in other versions of Word, such as Word 2016 or Word 2019.

As mentioned earlier, you can also open the search tool by pressing Ctrl+F on your keyboard.

Step 1: Open your document in Microsoft Word.

Step 2: Click the Home tab above the ribbon at the top of the window.

Step 3: Click the Find button in the Editing section of the ribbon.

Note that there are down arrows to the right of the Find button and the Select button in that section that you can use for other options. For example, there’s an Advanced Find option on the Find drop down menu that you can use for additional search options to locate a particular word or words in the document.

Step 4: Type your search term into the search box in the Navigation pane on the left side of the window.

Results containing your search term will appear in the column. You can then click a search result to be taken to its location in the document.

The up and down arrows under the search field will allow you to quickly move between the different results.

Additional Information on How to Search for a Word in a Microsoft Word Document

Find out how to remove page numbers in Microsoft Word if you have a document that contains page numbers that you either don’t want or don’t need.

Additional Sources

Matthew Burleigh has been writing tech tutorials since 2008. His writing has appeared on dozens of different websites and been read over 50 million times.

After receiving his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science he spent several years working in IT management for small businesses. However, he now works full time writing content online and creating websites.

His main writing topics include iPhones, Microsoft Office, Google Apps, Android, and Photoshop, but he has also written about many other tech topics as well.

How Can I Search for and Highlight Words in a Microsoft Word Document?

Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I search a Word document for any of 305 different words and highlight these words if they are found?

Hey, SB. This might be hard for you to believe, but the rest of the technical writing community doesn’t exactly hold the Scripting Guys in awe. However, most of our fellow writers do grudgingly concede that writing a daily scripting column is a noteworthy endeavor. “How do you do that?” they ask. “How do you find the time to write a brand-new column each and every day?”

Needless to say, the Scripting Guys reply with a very thoughtful monologue about the values of hard work, dedication, and devotion both to Microsoft and to Microsoft’s customers. But you guys know better: you’d like to know how we really manage to write a brand-new column each day. Well, just between you and us, here’s the secret: we don’t actually write a new column each day. It just looks like it.

If you ever decide to write a daily scripting column, our advice would be to write one column and then figure out how to keep writing that same column over and over again. For example, not too long ago we answered a question on how to search a Word document for a specific word and, if found, boldface that word. Now, someone who really was hardworking and dedicated would write that column and then forgot about it, moving on to the next challenge. But not the Scripting Guys. We saved that column, then waited for the opportunity to use it all over again.

And, lo and behold, here’s our opportunity. You need to search for any of 305 different words and then highlight those words if found? Well, we won’t actually show a script that uses 305 different words. But here’s a script that searches for two words – boldface and the – and highlights either of those words if found:

Like we said, this column is largely a rehash of a previous column on boldfacing words in a Word document. Because of that we’ll skip much of the explanation, and focus on the differences between this script and the boldfacing script. If you don’t fully understand the basic workings of this script (for example, how you conduct a find-and-replace operation in Microsoft Word in the first place) please see the boldfacing column for more details.

Just like the previous column, the script in this column starts out by creating a constant named wdReplaceAll and setting the value to 2; we’ll use this constant to tell Word to automatically replace all instances of the target text. We then create a visible instance of the Word.Application object and use the Open method to open the document C:\Scripts\Test.doc. After creating an instance of the Word Selection object we’re ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Our first step is to define the words we want to search for. In this case we’ve decided to search for only two words, so we simply store both of those words in an array named arrWords:

Note. If you wanted to you could create an array containing 305 words. Alternatively, it might be easier to simply list the words in a text file and then have the script read that text file line-by-line and then search for the words one at a time. That’s something we’ll leave up to you.

Next we set up a For Each loop to loop through this collection of words. Inside the loop we assign the first word in the array to the Text property of the Find object. Those two lines of code look like this:

After defining the search text we configure a few additional properties of the Find object, including the Forward and MatchWholeWord properties. The Forward property tells the script that we want the search to start at the beginning of the document (the default location for the Selection object) and continue forward through the end of the document. The MatchWholeWord property tells the script to match only exact instances of boldface and the; that way we don’t end up highlighting words like them, anthem, or anything else containing the letters t-h-e.

Of course, we don’t just want to find the target words; we also want to highlight those words as we find them. To do that all we have to do is set the value of the Replacement object’s Highlight property to True:

That’s basically all we have to do. From here we call the Execute method, which searches for and highlights all instances of the word boldface. The script then loops around and does the same thing for all instances of the second word in our array (the). This continues until we have searched for and highlighted all the words in our array, regardless of whether we have two words in the array or 302 words in the array. (And yes, it will work even if we have 305 words in the array.)

And what do we end up with when the script grinds to a halt? We end up with this:

Note. As it turns out, Test.doc happens to be the column on boldfacing words in a Word document. The Scripting Guys really are dedicated to recycling!

Of course, you might be thinking, “Well, that’s nice. But I just don’t like that yellow highlighting. If only there was a way to use turquoise highlighting instead.”

Hey, all you had to do was ask. It’s actually quite easy to assign a different color to your highlighter. To do that, start by picking a constant and value from the following table:

How to Use Find and Replace in Word

Exchange one text string for another in any version of Word

What to Know

All editions of Microsoft Word offer a feature called Find and Replace. Use this tool to search for a specific word, number, or phrase in a document and replace it with something else. You can also make several replacements at once—like changing a name or fixing something you’ve consistently misspelled. Use it, also, to replace numbers or punctuation and cap or uncap words.

If you turn on Track Changes before you begin, you can reject the replacement or deletion of any unintended word.

Find and Replace a Word

The Microsoft Word Find and Replace dialog box, in its simplest form, prompts you to type the word you’re looking for and the word you want to replace it with. Then, click Replace, and either allow Word to change every entry for you or, go through them one at a time.

To open the tool, press Ctrl+H (Cmd+H on Mac).

Change Capitalization in Microsoft Word

The Find and Replace feature doesn’t take into account anything about capitalization unless you specifically tell it to. To get to that option you’ll need to click the More option in the Find and Replace dialog box:

Advanced Options

When you select the More expander in the Search and Replace dialog box, you’ll encounter several customizations. The list of items varies according to which version of Word you’re running.

Search Options

Select the check boxes to include or exclude things like punctuation, white-space characters, or substrings. Plus, apply tools like word-form matching (i.e., walked also matches walking) and Soundex matching (Karin matches Karen).

Replace Options

Word supports more advanced substitutions, too. Use special characters to substitute text markup with symbols. For example, replace a character code like & with an ampersand. This approach is useful for de-cluttering pasted HTML text that uses HTML codes to render certain symbols.