Applies To
Word for Microsoft 365 Word 2024 Word 2021 Word 2019 Word 2016
  1. In the Find what box, enter the word or phrase you want to locate.

  2. Select Find Next until you come to the instance you want.

  3. Choose Find In, and select current selection, main document, or headers or footers.

  4. Choose Reading Highlight, and select Highlight All to highlight all occurrences at once. Select Clear Highlighting to clear found words.

Search options

  • Search    Specify the whole document, or from your cursor upwards or downwards.

  • Match case    Find words that only match specific capitalization.

  • Find Whole words only    Avoid partial matches, for example searching for "One" doesn't find "Someone."

  • Use wildcards    Get partial matches. For example, "the*" finds "theater", "thespian", and "thermin."

  • Sounds like (English)    Match words that sound like others, for example "they're", "there", and "their."

  • Find all word forms (English)    Find all verb tenses. For example, type "find", and Word will return "finds", "finding", and "found."

  • Match prefix    Works with other settings to find words with common prefixes or beginnings.

  • Match suffix    Works with other settings to find words with common suffixes or endings.

  • Ignore punctuation characters    Ignore differences in hyphenation.

  • Ignore white-space characters    Ignore spacing between characters.

Format button    Find page formatting options like Font types or colors, Paragraph formatting (left, right, center), or highlighted words.

Special button    Find page and character elements such as Em dashes, tabs, or Section Breaks.

No Formatting    Turn off formatting selections.

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