Searching for Formatting

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Searching for Formatting' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Adding Tags to Text
The Find and Replace capabilities of Word can be used to add HTML tags to your document text. This is easier to do than it may sound, using the technique outlined in this tip.

Automatically Formatting Text within Quotes
If you want to do formatting changes to quoted text within a document, figuring out exactly how to do it can be challenging. This tip discusses a couple of ideas you can use.

Finding Formatted Bulleted Paragraphs
You can use the Bullets tool on the Formatting toolbar to turn paragraphs into a bulleted list. If you want to later search for those bulleted lists, you may be out of luck—Word doesn't provide an inherent way to perform such a search. The macro in this tip can help you find the lists, however.

Protecting Hidden Text
Formatting some of your text as hidden can be a great help when you need to keep some things from being viewed or printed. The hidden text can be easily unhidden by anyone, however. Here's how to get rid of it so that it can't be uncovered.

Replacing Hidden Text
Word allows you to format text so it can be easily hidden from view and from printing. If you want to convert the hidden text to regular text, there's an easy way to do it using the regular Find and Replace capabilities of Word.

Searching for Borders
The Find and Replace feature in Word allows you to easily search for lots of different items or characteristics in your document. One of the things you cannot natively do, however, is to search for borders on paragraphs. This tip introduces two macros that make short work of finding any bordered paragraphs in your documents.

Searching for Character Formatting
Word doesn't limit you to searching only for text. You can also, among other things, search for text formatted in a specific manner. This tip explains how you can easily perform such a search.

Searching for Formatting
When searching for text, Word can pay attention to more than just the characters in the text. It can also pay attention to how that text is formatted. Here's how to search for character, paragraph, and style formatting.

Searching for Periods Not Followed by a Space
Most periods should be followed by at least one space. What if you think there may be some errors in how your post-period spacing appears? You can use the search techniques presented in this tip to locate the problem areas.

Searching for Text With a Certain Format
The Find and Replace tool in Word is very powerful. You can use it to search not only for text but for the formatting that may be applied to text. This tip explains how you can search for just the formatting you need.

Selective Formatting using Find and Replace
The Find and Replace tool in Word allows you to check for formatting in what you search for and use formatting in your replacement text. What it doesn't do is allow you to be selective on which characters of your replacement text have formatting applied. There is a way around this using two passes through Find and Replace, as described in this tip.