Find

Note: If you're after Find & Replace this is explored further below.

Find & the navigation pane

Pressing Ctrl + F will bring up the navigation pane on the left side of the app (which you can also move by dragging and dock to the right side if you prefer).

Type in a word or phrase and matching results are shown in a list below and are highlighted on the page.

You can view the matching results under three tabs, the other two are Headings, which show what headings and subheadings the matching results lie under, and Pages, to see thumbnails of their page location:

Advanced Find

Advanced Find is a useful tool if you're looking for a specific phrase with formatting, case, special symbol characters and gives you the option to use wildcards. It is found on the Home tab of the ribbon by clicking the drop down menu of the Find option (i.e. the arrow to the right of the Find button), and then selecting Advanced Find.

Find and Replace

There is also the option to Find and Replace where you can search characters, words or terms and replace them individually (via Replace) or all instances throughout the document (via Replace All). The keyboard shortcut to this feature is Ctrl + H.

Find and replace can be useful for mass formatting and correction of terms and even punctuation, e.g. changing all double quotation marks (“”) to single quotation marks (‘’) in a document if you needed to, or fixing irregular line spacing.

Advanced search options

For both Find or Find and Replace, clicking More > > bottom left provides advanced search options.

Match case

Make the search case-sensitive.

Match whole words only

Only matches your search term when it appears as a complete word, surrounded by spaces or punctuation. The matching word must be in standalone form. For example, if you have the word 'caption' in your document, searching for 'tion' with Match whole words only enabled won't pick up 'caption'.

Use wildcards

Wildcards are pattern characters that let you build flexible search patterns such as * for any string of characters and ? for any single character. This is an advanced feature which is explored with the use of Find and Replace in the Fixing irregular spacing article.

Enabling wildcards disables Match case, Match whole words only, Match prefixes and Match suffixes.

Sounds like

Finds words phonetically similar to your search term. This feature is limited to English and doesn't always produce reliable results. Best avoided.

Find all word forms

This matches grammatical variations of a search word. It works for variations of verbs, e.g. if you search 'ran' with Find all word forms enabled Word would find results matching like 'run', 'runs' and 'running'. It also works with some nouns with singular and plural variations.

Note: This option doesn't work with wildcards enabled.