Find & Select Formatting

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

While Google Docs already has a built-in feature for selecting formatted text, Multi Find & Replace gives you more control:
1. You can find formatting in a selection of a large document.
2. You can do a more general search. For example, you can find and select text based on only one property, eg bold, or italic. But the built in function always matches every font property, so you can't just search for all bold text etc.

Watch the video !

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.

About 'Normal text'

'Normal text' is what your document displays when you don't change any font settings at all.

It is very unlikely that you would want to search for normal text formatting, but if you ever do, this might help...

When you just start typing in a Google Doc wihout changing font details, the text format is the 'Normal text' style. This is usually Arial font, with size 11, but can be changed by the user.

The catch is that Google Doc scripts, like Multi-Find & Replace, cannot directly read any font formatting details from Normal text.

So, if 'Normal text' was set to Arial size 11 font, then you cannot search for 'Arial' as the font name, OR 11 as the font size.

To get around this problem, if you want to search for the font name and/or font size that is 'Normal text' in your document, simply leave the corresponding edit boxes blank. They will display 'Normal text' and 'Normal' (See diagram opposite.) Then you can search for these. (The 'Get Formats' button will do all this for you!)

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.

4. BE PATIENT !!

To search for the formatting, every character must be examined.
For a large document with hundreds of pages, this can take a few minutes. So just be patient!

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! 😁