Formatting All Headings At Once

Suppose you want to apply a particular formatting attribute to all the headings in your document in one fell swoop. If you use four heading levels in your document, and you want to make them all red, you could use Find and Replace to search for all the heading levels, in turn, and change them to red. This gets tedious, of course. You could speed up the process by using a macro, but the macro would still be quite long since you would still need to do four separate Find and Replace operations.

There is a quicker way, however: Do your work in Outline view. When you show only certain heading levels in Outline view, Find and Replace only operates on those particular heading levels. Follow these steps:

1. Switch to Outline view by clicking on the Outline View button on the status bar or in the View tab of the Ribbon.
2. Use the Show Level drop-down list on the Outlining tab of the ribbon to choose Level 4.
3. Press Ctrl+H to display the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
4. If available, click the More button. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.

5. In the Find What box, enter ^? to signify that you want to replace any character.
6. In the Replace With box, enter ^& to signify that you want to replace whatever is found with whatever was found.
7. With the insertion point still in the Replace With box, click the Format button and choose Font. Word displays the Replace Font dialog box. (See Figure 2.)



Figure 2. The Replace Font dialog box.

8. Using the Font Color control, choose the color of red you want to use.
9. Click OK to dismiss the Replace Font dialog box.
10. Click on Replace All.

The result of this procedure is that all the headings in the document are changed to red text. This works because Find and Replace only works with whatever is visible when you are working in Outline view. If you didn't use Find and Replace, but instead selected the whole document (Ctrl+A) and changed the font to red, Word would make the changes in everything you see and everything that is hidden. Using Find and Replace, instead, results in only the visible text being modified.

There is one time when you may not want to use this approach—if your document uses headers and footers, and especially if you have differing headers and footers for multiple sections in your document. The reason is because for some reason, Find and Replace changes the headers and footers to red as well, even though they are not visible in Outline view. (Why? I have no idea; it shouldn't work that way!)

If you want to bypass this problem, then you need to take a few additional steps by modifying the style definitions for your headings. Display the Styles task pane by pressing Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S. In the task pane, hover the mouse pointer over a heading style, click the down-arrow to the right of the style name, and then choose Modify. In the resulting dialog box, change the font color to red and click on OK. Repeat these steps for each of the heading styles you use.

While not technically fitting the definition of changing the formatting "all at once," you'll end up with the heading formatting you want and no other text (such as headers or footers) will be affected.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (5969) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Formatting All Headings At Once.