Find highlighted text in Word


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Someone sends you a long Word document and asks you to check only the changes, which they’ve highlighted. You have limited time so you need to find those highlighted passages quickly.

Here are two ways you can quickly find highlighted text — use the one that best suits your way of working.

Zoom in/out

Zoom out the view of the document and look for pages that contain highlighting, then click on a page and zoom back in again to view and edit the highlighted text.

You can go down to about 10 or 20% to see as many pages as possible without losing the ability to see the pages containing highlights.

To zoom in/out:

Word 2003: Select View > Zoom from the menu, then select or enter the percentage zoom you want.
Word 2007: Use the zoom slider at the bottom right of the Word window.

Here’s a few pages at 20% zoom — you can see the highlighted section easily:

Find highlighted text in Word

Find

The other way to find highlighted text is to use the Find function. Find is particularly handy if there’s a lot of highlighting, and you think you might miss some using the zoom function. It’s also handy for finding highlights you can't see, such as those hiding behind empty paragraph marks or graphics. Both Word 2003 and Word 2007 work the same way:

  • Press Ctrl+F to open the Find and Replace window.
  • Click More.

Find highlighted text in Word

Click Format and then select Highlight.

Find highlighted text in Word

Highlight should be the only "find" option. Click Find Next to find the next highlighted passage.

Find highlighted text in Word