The “Find” feature

The “Find” function allows us to search for key words or phrases used in the slides.
You will find the “Find” button under the “Home” tab in the “Ribbon”.
When we click on it, the “Find” dialog box opens:

Enter a word or phrase in the text box, and click the “Find Next” button.
When this button is clicked, it will navigate to the first slide in “PowerPoint” with matching text. “PowerPoint” will automatically select the text in the slide.
To move on with the search, click the “Find Next” button.
When the last slide with this text has been reached, “PowerPoint” will notify you.
To close the dialog box, click the “Close” button.

At the bottom of the “Find” dialog box, we have two options.
The first option tries to match case of the word i.e, small and capital letters are to be exactly the same.
The second option looks for the whole word and not for parts of the word.

The “Replace” option:
The “Replace” option allows us to replace different entries of a word or part of a word, with another word.
For example, in all my slides the word ‘free’ probably appears 50 times.
Instead of manually replacing it with the word ‘paying’, in each slide, I can allow “PowerPoint” to do this for me.
Click on the “Replace” button under the “Home” tab in the “Ribbon”.
This opens the “Replace” dialog box:

In the text box at the top, enter the word or words which must be replaced.
And in the text box below, enter the word that it should be replaced with.

Now you have two options, or you can click the “Replace All” button where “PowerPoint” will find and replace matching occurances of the word with the new word.
Or you can just click the “Find Next” button, and “PowerPoint” will replace the word whenever it is found, when you click the “Replace” button.
This allows you to replace each word one by one.
Of course, you can use the “Replace All” button at any time.

When you click on the “Replace All” button, “PowerPoint” will display a message in which the number of times this word was replaced is shown.

The “Thesaurus”

This option has nothing to do with “Search” and “Replace”, but I will quickly go through this.When we type a lot of text and don’t want any repitition, we can use the “Thesaurus” option.

This button can be found under the “Review” tab in the “Ribbon”. First select the word in the slide for which you want to find a synonym.

Click the “Thesaurus” button under the “Review” tab in the “Ribbon”.

This opens the “Research” task pane to the right of the window.

Enter the word in the search box for which synonyms are to be searched for,(1) and click the “Start Searching” (2) button.

Select the word found in the “Thesaurus”, click the arrow pointing downwards and select one of the options from the drop-down menu (3).

To return, close the task pane by clicking the X icon (4) in the upper right corner of the task panel.

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