(Credit: Microsoft)
Until a few years ago, when you wanted to search your document, Word opened a full-featured Find and Replace dialog box that floated above the editing window. Now, by default, when you press Ctrl-F (or Cmd-F on a Mac) or you open the Find command from the Editing box in the ribbon, Word for Windows opens a Navigation pane to the left of the document, and Word for the Mac opens search box at the upper right. If you want to search for a paragraph mark or a tab or nonbreaking space or other nonprinting characters, there’s no obvious way to do it.
The slow solution, in Windows, is to click the drop-down arrow at the right of the search box in the Navigation pane and choose Advanced Find. This opens the old-style Find and Replace dialog box, with a More… button that leads to options for searching invisible characters or text formatted with a specific font or margins, and much more. (On a Mac, choose Edit > Find > Advanced Find and Replace...) The “Special…” button shows you a list of invisible and other codes that you can enter in the Find or Replace box, including ^p for a paragraph mark, ^t for a tab character, and much else. You can replace excess paragraph marks by replacing ^p^p with ^p and repeating the operation until no excess paragraph marks clutter your document. For a faster solution, see the next tip.