Copying Found Items to a New Document

Robert notes that Word allows him to locate and highlight all the instances of an item that he enters in the Find dialog box. He wonders if, from that point, there is some way he can select all the highlighted instances so that he can copy and paste them into a new document.

Copying individual items that are found is easy—all you need to do is have the source and target documents open, find what you want in the source document, copy it to the Clipboard, and then paste it into the target document. Copying a bunch of found items at once is a bit trickier, however. Here's how to do it:

1. Make sure you have the source and target documents both open, with the source document active.
2. Display the Find tab of the Find and Replace dialog box. (In Word 2007 just press Ctrl+F. In Word 2010 or a later version display the Home tab of the ribbon, click the down-arrow next to the Find tool, and then click Advanced Find.) (See Figure 1.)



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

3. In the Find What box enter what you want to search for.
4. Set any other parameters you desire for your search.
5. Click the Find In drop-down list and select Main Document. Word selects, within the main document, all the matches it found.
6. Click the title bar of your source document. This moves focus from the Find and Replace dialog box to the document itself, and all the selected items remain selected.
7. Press Ctrl+C. This copies all the selected items to the Clipboard.
8. Switch to the target document.
9. Press Ctrl+V. Word pastes the Clipboard contents (all the matched information) into the target document.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12391) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Copying Found Items to a New Document.