Find and Replace in Word
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Category: Microsoft Word

You've used Find and Replace in Microsoft Word. You probably think it's so easy that you know it inside and out. You type one thing and replace it with something else, what more is there to learn? Well how about when you are trying to find things that might not all be the same? What do you do then? You play with some of the lesser used advanced features of Find & Replace, that's what! Here's just a few, but there's plenty more where these came from.

To see these options if they aren't showing, click the More button in your Find & Replace window.
Use Wildcards - This checkbox allows you to use a question mark or asterisk to indicate that it could be any letter. A question mark finds a single letter. If you wanted to find any two letters in a row, you would use two question marks. Three letters? Three question marks. An asterisk finds a series of letters, regardless of the number of letters involved. Therefore, s?ng would find sang, sing, song, sung. s*ng would find those words plus string, but it could also highlight from the first occurrence of s through the next occurrence of ng (which may not be what you want). Word does not allow you to select "whole word only" as an option when using wildcards (or any special characters for that matter). String could also have been found with s???ng.
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Not looking for any specific text at all, but want to get rid of formatting in your document or change all references of Arial font to Times New Roman in a document that uses multiple fonts? Maybe you have one of those bosses who told you to use green text on every other line in this 2314 page long document, but now insists that the text be red. Perhaps that very technology illiterate boss has decided not to use track changes but instead apply yellow highlighter throughout a 100 page document whenever changes were made (though I'm sure it's only *my* helpful coworkers that do that sort of thing). No problem, you can do that kind of find and replace action too!
Find Formatting - At the bottom of the Find & Replace window, there is a button called Format. You can search for various formatting options, including font, paragraph, tab, borders, frame, and language settings. The windows that appear with each of these options will match the windows that would appear if you chose them from the Format menu. You need to make sure you have clicked in the correct box (Find What or Replace With) before you make selections. Note that as you make the selections, the options you select will show beneath the appropriate fields. Don't type any text in the Find What or Replace With fields - just leave those blank. Word will then just change the formatting without affecting the existing text. After you are done replacing your formatting, be sure to clear those fields so they don't affect future searching by clicking each field and then clicking the "No formatting" button at the bottom of the window.
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Have you ever copied and pasted text from an email, only to have it include all the extra tabs and spaces from the email being forwarded multiple times? You know what I'm talking about. What a pain in the neck getting rid of all that white space, because each line doesn't have exactly the same number of tabs and spaces for you to search for, right? Did you know Word's Find & Replace feature has a function to help you? Oh, yes, it does...
Find White Space - At the bottom of the Find & Replace window, click the Special button. You'll see a lengthy list of options, some of which are unique, depending on if you have clicked in the Find What or Replace With field first. One of the options that shows on the Find What list is White Space. Clicking this adds ^w to your Find What field. This will search for all white space in your text, including multiple spaces and tabs. Be sure to include a single space in your Replace With field.
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I can hear some of you grumbling right now under your breath about how you wish you had known about some of these features before and how you spent hours manually removing that dang yellow highlighter your boss used, etc. It's ok. We've all got to learn new things some time. Let the past go, grasshopper. Focus on the future and how much time and effort you will be saving going forward!
There's actually A LOT more that you can do with Find & Replace in Word. If you ever have to do some kind of a manual replacement action in a document, check to see if something exists in Find & Replace that can make your job easier. I could teach an entire hour long class on all the nuances available in this feature. It's incredibly powerful and I encourage you to explore it further.
Smart Art - Coolest Thing Ever!
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Category: Technology

Smart Art is a feature that was introduced to Microsoft Office in the 2002/2003 version, but it was expanded and beefed up (hmmm momentary distraction - is the phrase "beefed up" offensive to vegetarians?) in the Office 2007 version (yes Office - it's in Word, Excel and Powerpoint). Let me just tell you right now that this is not only one of THE *coolest* features ever in Microsoft Office, it's also one of the most fun to play with. Just take my word for it and take three minutes RIGHT NOW to check it out, if you haven't played with it before. You'll be glad you did. :)

Think back... to the dark ages... and for some of you, it may have been just yesterday... when your boss asked you to put together a simple diagram - perhaps a flow chart or whatever, where you have four or five boxes, each with a word in each box, maybe arrows pointing from one box to the next. Easy peasy, right? Then remember how your boss always came back and either asked for one more box to be added in the middle or one box removed. Remember how you had to manually resize all the text when you resized the boxes? Remember how you had to manually resize and move the boxes to accommodate changes? Remember having to flip all the arrows by hand when your boss decided to reverse the flow? Remember how excited you were when you learned how to select more than one box at a time and move things as a group cause every little tip helped save you at least a little bit of time for this project that sometimes took hours?

Welcome to the Age of Enlightenment, otherwise known as Smart Art. In Office 2003, the button is located on your drawing toolbar - you'll just have to poke around and play with it and know that 2003 can do most of what I am about to say. The rest of these instructions are based on Office 2007.

Click the Insert Ribbon, then the Smart Art button.  A window pops up offering you all kinds of graphics (like organization chart style, relationships, pyramids, cycles, etc.). Each one of those options on the left shows different graphics on the right hand side. Pick one you like. For purposes of illustration, scroll down and pick the first graphic under Cycles (five circles with arrows connecting them). Like magic, a graphic pops up in your window with five windows and arrows connecting them. On the left hand side is a window with a bulleted list. If you don't see that bulleted list, just left mouse click on the two triangles in the middle of the left hand side of the graphic or click Text Pane on the Design Ribbon. 

  1. Type Apple as the first bullet. See how Apple gets added to the first circle.
  2. Type Watermelon as the second circle. Note how the text automatically resizes itself in the circles to match each other with the longer word.
  3. Delete the third bullet. Note how one of the circles gets deleted, so you now have four circles instead of five, and notice how the text resized itself slightly larger to allow for this.
  4. Delete the third bullet again. Note how another circle gets deleted, so you now have three circles instead of four and notice how the text resized itself slightly larger to allow for this.
  5. Hit enter, and see how a new blank bullet is added and a new circle is added back to bring us back to four circles. Type Lemon for this bullet and Lime in the last bullet.
  6. Look up at your ribbon bars and you will see that new ribbon bars were added for Design and Format (as long as you are clicked on your Smart Art diagram). Note that you have buttons on the Design ribbon that allow you to add a shape before after your current circle (you can also do this by just pressing enter in the bulleted list).

Boss decided to reverse the order of the boxes? Woo hoo! The right to left button acts as a toggle to reverse or restore the order.

You'll see a group of buttons in the Layout palette. Click on the double triangle button at the bottom and all the cycles options become available. You can move your mouse over each graphic to get a preview in your document of how it will look (note that sometimes it doesn't look the way you would expect, sometimes you have to play with them a bit).

But wait, your boss comes back and says let's do this as a table format instead. You'll remember the dark ages briefly and cringe in pain. Oh yes, I well remember, selecting those boxes, deleting them, drawing new circles or triangles or whatever and basically starting over. Now? Ha! I laugh in the face of starting over. Instead I just click More Layouts at the bottom of the Layouts group of graphics. It brings up that original list of Smart Art diagrams and I can choose the first graphic under List. Voila, my round circles are converted to text box tables going across the page instead.

Bossie comes back and raves about the new layout, except that he really doesn't care for the color scheme. Oh ye of little faith... See the button called color scheme? Just click and you can see the Live Preview of colors as you move your mouse over the various options. Want it to look even a little bit fancier but still subtle? Move your mouse over the Smart Art Styles buttons and you'll see changes in shading, 3D effects and more. And again, click on the double triangle button and you'll see all the options at once.

The Format ribbon will give you more control over things like the font effects and borders, as well as things like wrapping document text around your diagram.

One last tip. Don't like the final size of the diagram? It's a picture! You can click and drag along the dots on the edges just like any other object in Office.

Play around. I think you will agree that Smart Art is one of the..

Coolest. Things. EVER!