Find All the Acronyms in Your Word Documents

Our language today is riddled with acronyms. However, to be effective our written communications must consider our target audience. In other words, what we write must be easily understood by our target audience. For this reason, it's important to evaluate whether the meaning of any acronyms we've used is known to our audience. Here's a tip for quickly locating all the acronyms in a Word document.

First, open the Find window by pressing CTRL + F. Check the box labeled "Use Wildcards" (you may have to click the "More" button to see this option). In the "Find What" field, type this: <[A-Z]{2,}> , click "Reading Highlight," and then "Highlight All." Click the "X" in the upper right corner of the Find window to close it. All your acronyms are now highlighted. Press CTRL + Z to remove the highlighting, or simply close the document without saving it.

If you need to save the document with the highlighting in place, then remove it later, there's a way to do that also. (These instructions are for Word 2007; they will be slightly different for previous versions of Word.) With the document open, press CTRL + A to highlight all the document. Then make sure you're on the Home tab. Click the arrow next to the Text Highlight Color button (has the letters "ab" highlighted in yellow on it) and choose "No Color." This will remove highlighting from the entire document.

And if you're curious about what sort of strange mojo is invoked by "<[A-Z]{2,}>", programmers call it a regular expression. If you're bored or need to feed your inner geek, you can learn more about using regular expressions in Word searches here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA010873051033.aspx.