OpenOffice Tutorial: Find Whole Words
How-To: OpenOffice Tutorial: Find Whole Words
- 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.
by Kaj Kandler

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.
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