Word: Find and replace a word or phrase within a header or footer

This post is similar to the one I wrote for finding/replace a word/phrase within comments.

NOTE: It only works if you have some text in any header or footer in the document—if the headers/footers haven’t been used, then you do not get the option to find the text within them.

1. Press Ctrl+h to open the Find and Replace window. It will open with Replace as the active tab.
2. Select the Find tab. This is important as this is the only place you can specify to search only in the comments.
3. Type the word/phrase you want to find in the Find field.
4. Still on the Find tab, click Find In.
5. Select Headers and Footers.
   
6. Now go to the Replace tab. The word/phrase you typed in the Find tab is carried over to the Replace tab, AND the ‘find in headers and footers’ setting is carried over too, even though there’s nothing to tell you that.
7. Do the find/replace as you normally would—if you think you might accidentally replace something you shouldn’t, then do Find Next followed by Replace as necessary; if you’re confident that you’ll only replace what you need to (e.g. a company name), then go ahead and click Replace All. Only the word/phrase in the comments is replaced, not anywhere else in the document.

 

Word: Find and replace a word or phrase within comments

Tracy contacted me to ask if there was a way to find/replace a word (e.g. a company name) used within comments.

There are a couple of ways you can do this—one is to save the document as a ZIP file and modify the comments.xml file (see the steps in blog post for something similar: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/word-removing-reviewer-names/), but the other way is much simpler and is what I describe here.

1. Press Ctrl+h to open the Find and Replace window. It will open with Replace as the active tab.
2. Select the Find tab. This is important as this is the only place you can specify to search only in the comments.
3. Type the word/phrase you want to find in the Find field.
4. Still on the Find tab, click Find In.
5. Select Comments.
   
6. Now go to the Replace tab. The word/phrase you typed in the Find tab is carried over to the Replace tab, AND the ‘find in comments’ setting is carried over too, even though there’s nothing to tell you that.
7. Do the find/replace as you normally would—if you think you might accidentally replace something you shouldn’t, then do Find Next followed by Replace as necessary; if you’re confident that you’ll only replace what you need to (e.g. a company name), then go ahead and click Replace All. Only the word/phrase in the comments is replaced, not anywhere else in the document.

NOTE: This also works for words in headers and footers. See https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2020/06/09/word-find-and-replace-a-word-or-phrase-within-a-header-or-footer/

Another milestone: 15 million views

Sometime in the past few days, this blog hit 15 million views. As at today (3 June 2020) it had had 15,011,177 views, so based on 5000–6000 views per day on average, I expect the 15 million mark ticked over around 1 June.