Formatting All Headings At Once

Suppose you want to apply a particular formatting attribute to all the headings in your document in one fell swoop. If you use four heading levels in your document, and you want to make them all red, you could use find and replace to search for all the heading levels, in turn, and change them to red. This gets tedious, of course. You could speed up the process by using a macro, but the macro would still be quite long since you would still need to do four separate find and replace operations.

There is a quicker way, however: Do your work in Outline view. When you show only certain heading levels in Outline view, find and replace only operates on those particular heading levels. Follow these steps:

1. Switch to Outline view by clicking on the Outline View button on the status bar.
2. If you are using a version of Word prior to Word 2007, click the number 4 on the Outline toolbar so that only your headings, levels 1 through 4, are displayed. (In Word 2002, you use the Show Level control to choose Show Level 4.)
3. If you are using Word 2007 use the Show Level drop-down list on the Outlining tab of the ribbon to choose Level 4.
4. Press Ctrl+H to display the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
5. If available, click the More button. (Click here to see a related figure.)
6. In the Find What box, enter an asterisk.
7. In the Replace With box, enter ^& to signify that you want to replace whatever is found with whatever was found.
8. With the insertion point still in the Replace With box, click the Format button and choose Font. Word displays the Replace Font dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)
9. Using the Font Color control, choose the color of red you want to use.
10. Click OK to dismiss the Replace Font dialog box.
11. Click on Replace All.

The result of this procedure is that all the headings in the document are changed to red text. This works because find and replace only works with whatever is visible when you are working in Outline view. If you didn't use find and replace, but instead selected the whole document (Ctrl+A) and changed the font to red, Word would make the changes in everything you see and everything that is hidden. Using find and replace, instead, results in only the visible text being modified.