“Find”:

The “Find” option allows us to navigate through our document, while searching for a word or phrase.
The “Find” button is found under the “Home” tab on the ribbon.
When we click this button, it opens the “Navigation Pane” (1), which is new in Word 2010.
We will discuss the navigation pane in greater detail in a later lesson, but, right now, we will continue with the “Find” option.

When we click the “Find” button, a box opens, in which we can enter a word, part of a word, or words related to what we are looking for (2).
As soon as something is entered, “Word” will display the number of related documents, it has found, in the “Navigation pane”, and it will also display them in a list (3). Clicking on an item from the list, will immediately open the document where the keyword was found.
These results are shown in yellow in the document (4).

Advanced Find

A second way to search, in our document, is with the help of the “Advanced Find” option.
Just click the downward pointing arrow next to the “Find” button on the Ribbon, and select “Advanced Find” from the drop-down menu.

Enter the keyword in the “Find what:” text box, It could be a word or phrase that you’re looking for.
When you have entered the text you want to search for, you have several options.

The first option is the “Find Next” button.
When we click on it, Word will start searching at the point where the cursor is, in our document.
If you click the “Find Next” button again, it will start searching for the next similar word.
You can keep clicking this button until you have found the word and, “Word” will inform you accordingly, when the end of the document is reached.

The second option is “Find in”.
When we click on it, it opens a menu with several options. When you select “Main Document”, “Word” will show you the number of words found in the dialog box, and it selects all the keywords found in the document.

Search options

Clicking on the “More” button in the “Find and Replace” dialog box, gives us more options that can help with our search.

First, we have the “Search” text box, which gives us the option of searching donward or upward.
Both these options depend on the present location of the cursor, in the document
A third option is “All”, which searches through your entire document.

When you select the “Match Case” check box, you will only find the words that are identical to the word, having matching case.
When you select the “Find Whole Words only” check box, “Word” will only search for the complete word and not a part of it.
When you select the “Use wildcards” check box, Word allows us to use wildcards in our search. We’ll discuss wildcards in greater detail, in the next lesson.
I think the “Sounds like” and “Find all word forms” check boxes are quite clear.

The “Match Prefix” check box will find all words that begin with the same spelling, everytime you type.
The same holds good for the next check box, except that it checks for the same end character.

The next two courses “Ignore Punctuation” and “Ignore white Space Characters” do exactly what they say. Punctuation and spaces are ignored.

Find Format:

The “Find” option allows us to not only search for text but, also for a specific format of a text.
For example, you have a specific paragraph in your text centered, you can find this by clicking on the “Format” and select “Paragraph”.

In the dialog box that appears, select “Center” as the alignment, and click OK.
Click “Find Next”, in the next dialog box.
This is done for just about any formatting in your document. Depending on what option you selected in the “Format” drop-down menu, a different dialog box will be displayed.
But I think all this is quite clear.

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