Find & Select Formatting

This feature enables you to find and select text in a Google Doc according to its formatting.

See other pages on this website for further information:

Getting Started Find & Replace Settings

Data Management Regular Expressions

Find & Replace 'Returns' Remove empty paragraphs

How to use it:
NOTE: To find and select formatting in tables, select text within table cells, or select one or more whole cells.

Example 1: Searching for and selecting bold text:

Simply select the 'bold' option and click 'FIND & SELECT' !

Example 2: Searching for and selecting bold italic text:

NOTE: Format options combine with AND. So selecting 'bold' and 'italic' search options searches for bold italic text.
So in this case text that is only bold, or only italic, will not be selected. You can see this in the example below. Bold italic text is selected, but text that is bold but not italic, OR italic but not bold, is not selected.

Example 3: Getting formats directly from text in your Doc

Then click 'FIND & SELECT' to select all text with that formatting in your document.

Some helpful hints...

Using the 'highlighted' and 'highlight colour' options.

Choosing only the 'highlighted' option will search for ALL highlighted text in the document, now matter what the highlight colour is.

If you also select the 'highlight colour' option, then ONLY highlighted text with that particular highlight colour will be found.

2. The fewer options the faster the search.

Fewer chosen formatting options means less things that need to be matched. This also means a faster search.

For example, in 'Example 3' above, we don't really need to search for the font name and font size. So these could be unselected before searching.

3. Using the 'Clear' button

This will uncheck all of the check boxes. This is often useful after using the 'Get Formats' button, where you can clear all of the check boxes and then select only the formats you need to search for.

NOTE: This is a new feature which I must say has been a very big challenge to get it all working . And while I have made every effort to get rid of nasty bugs, there could still be some lurking. So if something doesn't work as expected, please use the support form on this website to tell me about it, in a nice way of course! 😁