Find and Replace Specific Text of a Specific Color

Question

Let's say I have a Word document containing the word "Sheep" multiple times in the colors red, green, and blue. If I want to turn all instances of red "Sheep" text into "Dog" and all green "Sheep" into "Cow", is that possible?

Answer 1

In the Find and Replace dialog box (Ctrl+H), you can use the Format drop down to specify formatting characteristics for words that you want to find and replace.

In this case, you particularly want to use Format > Font.

Answer 2

Yes, but...

There are a plethora of colors that I would call Red, Green, and Blue. If these colors were applied by a user chances are high that some will not be the appropriate color.

Much better would be to have character styles, rather than colors. The character styles, themselves can have font colors as the attribute if you wish. If you do that, you can use the Replace feature to find and change them simply by searching for the style.

You could do the same thing searching for the colors, but I think you would miss some. Stefan has shown you how to do the Replace. The same thing could be done with searching for a given style.

See The Importance of Styles in Microsoft Word.

Answer 3

Indeed, using Find & Replace will be easier if standard colors have been used—and more complex if you haven't used the standard colors.

As you noticed, using character styles for character formatting will always be more convenient.