Note: This article first appeared on the PEN Tips blog on February 19, 2026.
Find and Replace seems like a simple Microsoft Word tool on the surface, but it has surprisingly powerful capabilities that can save both time and wear and tear on the hands during a long day of editing. Most editors are probably already doing basic Find and Replace searches, such as replacing double spaces between sentences with single spaces. But that’s only the beginning of what this tool can do.
When I’m copyediting or proofreading a manuscript, I like to run a number of additional Find and Replace searches that can quickly catch a variety of issues.
Punctuation
Find and Replace is a great way to locate minor punctuation errors that can easily sneak into a manuscript. For example, I like to search for spaces before commas and spaces before or after em dashes. A global Find and Replace is also an easy way to eliminate straight quotation marks from a manuscript by changing them to curly ones. Simply type a quotation mark into both the “Find what” and the “Replace with” boxes, and then hit “Replace All.” In a similar fashion, straight apostrophes can be replaced with curly ones with just a few keystrokes.
Special Characters
I also like to run Find and Replace searches for special characters such as paragraphs (^p) and tabs (^t). Searching for “^t” will show you every tab in the manuscript, most of which should be replaced by the paragraph indent function or deleted altogether. Searching for “^p ” (the paragraph character followed by a space) will bring up every instance of a stray extra space at the beginning of a paragraph.
Proper Names
In addition to those basic and sort of mundane searches, Find and Replace can be used more creatively. When I’m editing a fiction manuscript, I often conduct a quick search for likely misspellings of the names of characters or places. For example, if a character is named Isabella, I may do a quick search for “Isabela” and then “Isabelle.” Or if a book is set in Edinburgh, I may search for “Edinburg.” It’s amazing to me how often those searches find a match somewhere in the book!
Wildcards
Finally, you can turbocharge your Find and Replace searches by using Wildcards. How to use Wildcards in Microsoft Word could be a completely separate article (or several), but here’s a brief overview. In Word, the term Wildcard refers to a character (or string of characters) that can help you search for patterns in the text, rather than exact words. For example, Wildcards can be used to find (and then replace) every instance where two numbers are joined by a hyphen instead of an en dash, without having to do a search for every hyphen in the book and then sift through the results (which would be tedious indeed).
The best resource I’ve found for learning how to use Wildcards is Jack Lyon’s Wildcard Cookbook. It’s available as a free download at this link, or it can be purchased in the usual online bookstores.
As editors, we all want to work as efficiently as possible, not only to save time but also to prevent ergonomic injuries. The creative use of Find and Replace is one tool that can aid us in achieving this goal, helping us to both serve our clients well and take care of ourselves. Investing a little time up front learning to use this tool effectively can pay big dividends throughout our careers.
