Such a search is less intensive for the program and will therefore be faster with large amounts of text.īefore you go setting this option, be forewarned that it will omit any plurals from your search results. To further demonstrate my point, the word ‘in’ does not appear within the sample sentence on its own using ‘Find whole words’, but would be found twice within the word “finding” with that choice off.īy selecting the ‘Find whole words only’ option, Office will omit matches to any search query that is found _within_ a word of the document. The less obvious match comes as part of the tail-end of the second word of the text, which is ‘sample’. There is only one instance of the word ‘ample’ within the text, searching without the ‘Find whole words only’ option would actually find 2 matches. Let’s pretend that you are searching for the word ‘ample’ out of the following short text: “This sample sentence is one way to demonstrate the ample finding flexibility of Office”. Feel free to try it for yourself in Microsoft Word. To demonstrate the difference between having the ‘Find whole words only’ option selected and not having it selected, I will use a very simple example. A ‘whole word’ is defined in Office as a group of characters surrounded on either side by one or more spaces or punctuation marks. ‘Find whole words only’ is a selectable option in Word that can be accessed in the Find feature (Ctrl-F) by clicking the ‘More’ button to display more specific search features.īut what does it mean to find whole words only? Isn’t that what a normal search is meant to do? Well… yes and no. It’s called Advanced Find but many long-time Word users will know it as the standard Find dialog that’s been in Word for many, many years.Ĭlick on the More … button to see a lot of power in Word’s Find.

Microsoft word 2016 word search