Many people are familiar with the global find and replace feature, which will allow you to search a document and replace certain words or phrases with alternate words or phrases. What many people are not aware of, however, is that they can also use this powerful feature to search for certain formatting attributes and change those globally, as well.
For example, if your document was formatted so that many of your paragaphs have been right aligned, and you would like to change them to center alignment, you can use this feature.
Using the pull-down menu, go to Edit, Replace to open the Find and Replace dialog box. At the bottom of the window, click the More button to expand the dialog box. Click the Format button, then choose Paragraph. This opens a tabbed dialog box. Ensure that you are viewing the Indents and Spacing tab. You will see the word General at the top of the dialog box. Click the drop down box next to Alignment, select Right, then click OK to close the dialog box.
The "Find what" field now shows the criteria you wish to search for to replace (right alignment).
Click the "Replace wIth" field to position your cursor and then simply repeat the previous steps with the desired formatting. That is, click the Format button, choose Paragraph, General Alignment, select Centered. Click OK to close the dialog box.
The "Replace with" field of the dialog box is now populated with the replacement formatting (center alignment).
Click the Find Next button to begin the process. The first paragraph with centered alignment will be highlighted (you may have to drag the Find and Replace dialog box out of the way, as the highlighted paragraph may be hidden by this box). If you wish to change the formatting of this paragraph, click the Replace button so the new formatting will override the old formatting. If, instead, you want to retain the original formatting for this particular paragraph, click the Find Next button to skip to the next occurrence. Continue this process throughout your document until you have made all desired changes, and then close the dialog box when you are finished. If you prefer to change every occurrence of the formatting at one time, rather than one instance at a time, click the Replace All button to make the change globally.