As I’ve noted in the past, some aspects of more recent versions of Word give me a big pain. So for small tasks like writing this article, I tend to just revert back to Word 2000, which is faster and less filled with annoyances like the Task Pane, which I detest.
However, newer versions of Word do have a feature that is completely cool. Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of quality time using Find and Replace to quickly fix many problem documents. But when you do a big replace, there’s also a big risk. You can make a mess if you’re not careful. Sometimes you confidently click the Replace button and serious badness ensues when you discover later that you replaced a bunch of stuff that you really shouldn’t have.
Anyway, new versions of Word have a new check box in the Find dialog box that says "Highlight all items." So before you do something drastic you can scroll through and see exactly what would be affected. For example, say you want to change every instance of the word "table" to "chair." If you highlight all items first, you’d see that the word "comfortable" now would become comforchair. Ooops. So you can go back and tweak your search to make it smarter (such as by clicking Find whole words only in the search options).
The highlight feature works because later versions of Word can highlight non-continuous text. So you can use Find and Replace to do other tricky things, such as pulling out pieces of your document. For example, many times I have wanted to pull out just the headings from a document. I thought you could do it in outline view, but in older versions, I couldn’t. I’d try and copy just the headings, yet get everything.
Now you can do a search for anything tagged with a particular style, such as Heading 1. All the text is highlighted, so you can press Ctrl+C and copy it out to a new document. If you use character styles you can format particular terms using the style, then search for the character style and copy out the text. This technique would be a great way to gather the terms for a glossary or URLs for a Web index without having to resort to using bookmarks.