How-To: Find Whole Words - OpenOffice.org Writer
- To find a word, click on the "Edit" menu.
- Select the "Find & Replace" item from the menu.
- The "Find & Replace" dialog appears.
- Click in the "Search for" field.
- Type the word you want to find.
- For this demonstration, clear the "Match case" checkbox, so we find more occurrences of the word.
- Click on the "Find" button to execute the "Find" action.
- Writer highlights the first occurrence of the text fragment.
- Click the "Find" button again.
- Writer advances to the next occurrence of the text fragment.
- To restrict the search to whole words, check the "Whole words only" checkmark.
- Click the "Find" button again.
- Writer found the fragment, preceded by an underscore "_" and followed by a period ".". While the underscore can be part of a word, the period delimits words.
- Writer skipped over this occurrence of "install" because it is part of another word.
- Click the "Find" button again, to advance to the next occurrence of the word. This time surrounded by spaces " ".
- Click on the "Close" button to end the "Find" action and close the dialog.
powered by Plan-B screencast technology
Find Whole Words
This screencast teaches how to find whole words only. You learn:
- How to start a "Find & Replace" action.
- How to enter the word to search for.
- How to restrict search to "Whole words" only.
- How OpenOffice.org Writer highlights the next occurrence of the text pattern searched for.
- How to request exact matching of capitalization.
Advanced topics
For advanced functionality with similar results see:
- Find words or text fragments going backwards in the text.
- Find text patterns using regular expressions.
OpenOffice.org™ is a trademark of OpenOffice.org.









