Let’s look into this in more detail.

The Find tab lets you simply locate each instance of a word within the document.

Here, we’ve told Word to search for “the” in our text.

Word document showing the ‘Find And Replace’ dialog box, accessed through Ctrl+H.

The Replace tab lets you swap one word for another.

Having already opened the Find And Replace window (Ctrl+H), click “More.”

This will show you a host of other things you’re free to do with Find And Replace.

Word document showing the word ‘the’ typed into the Find What box in the ‘Find’ tab, the ‘Find Next’ option highlighted, and the result showing in the document text.

Let’s look at each of these options.

First, check the “Match Case” box.

Next, bang out the corrected version into the Replace With box, and click “Replace All.”

Word document showing the word ‘south’ typed into the Find What box and ‘north’ typed into the Replace With box in the ‘Replace’ tab. The ‘Replace All’ option is highlighted, and the result is showing in the document text.

If you don’t want this to happen, read the next section!

As a result, we need to change the whole word only.

Use Wildcards

Using Wildcards sounds more complicated than it is.

Word document showing the ‘Find And Replace’ window, and the ‘More’ option highlighted.

Wildcards stand in for unknown elements in a text and can help you find items with a similar construction.

To check for this error, typehearorhereinto the Find What box to flag up all examples of these homophones.

The Match Prefix and Match Suffix options let you search for words that contain these parts of words.

The ‘Find And Replace’ window open in Word, with the additional search options enabled and highlighted.

This search would identify both “wont” and “won’t” in the result.

And that’s it!

Why not try combining some of the “Find And Replace” options to further refine your search?

‘Find And Replace’ window with the ‘Match Case’ option checked and the example of ‘internet’ (without a capital) to ‘Internet’ (with a capital) typed into the boxes.

‘Find And Replace’ window with the ‘Find Whole Words Only’ option checked and the example of ‘Dog’ to ‘Woof woof’ typed into the boxes.

Word document with the words ‘Woof woof’ on the first line and ‘Dogs’ on the second line.

Word document showing where to find the wildcard special characters in the ‘Find And Replace’ window.

Word document showing ‘Find All Word Forms" and the example of ‘eat’, ‘eating’, and ‘eaten’ being found, but not ‘beating’.

Word document showing the ‘Ignore Punctuation’ box checked in the ‘Find And Replace’ window, with ‘wont’ typed into the ‘Find What’ box.

Word document showing the ‘Find And Replace’ window open and the ‘Search’ drop-down options open.