One of the most popular features of Microsoft Word is the feature that allows you to search for something, and then replace it. It allows you to easily as well as quickly change all of the instances of a phrase or a word to something different. It also allows you to replace special characters, formatting or even those blank spaces if you want. You can quickly open this great feature without leaving the keyboard by pressing F5, Alt and P at the same time or Ctrl H.

It’s handy for a lot more than just replacing phrases or words. Some people still tap their spacebar twice after a period. Instead of trying to remember to do this all the time, they can simply change the doubles to single spaces through this feature. Simply put the two spaces in the field to search and then one space in the replace field, then hit replace all.

If you want to get rid of special characters, such as those line breaks that are manual, tabs, or paragraph break? This can be accomplished with this feature as well. Simply click “More” in the dialog box and when it expands, click on the special option and then simply choose the character that’s going to be replaced. Now you’ll replace it with nothing. This will be done with going to the field for replacing and pressing your delete button to make sure that the box is empty. You can do find next if you want to do it manually or you can replace them all to get rid of the characters.

Anyone who uses Word a lot knows how useful this feature is finding things that are wrong with the document and changing them, quickly and easily. Instead of looking through the document manually, all you have to do is to put in what you want changed and what you want it changed to. The program does it for you.