Buzz
For those in typical office work, they may not care about converting commas to periods in Word, questioning its necessity and benefits. However, changing commas to periods in Word standardizes a document because in the conventions of the US, UK, and some other countries, periods separate decimal numbers while commas separate units. In Asia, including Vietnam, the convention is reversed, causing inadvertent complications when doing business with foreign partners.
Unlike Excel, Word lacks an automatic mode to change commas to periods. It must be manually adjusted. Although the mode in Excel is easily adjustable with fewer steps, there are alternative methods for readers to promptly change commas to periods in Word.
How to Convert Commas to Periods in Word
Since Word lacks the feature to convert commas to periods like Excel, we will use a different method to change commas to periods in Word. That method is the Replace feature, which will be applied to change commas to periods in Word for the following text.
Step 1: First, simply highlight the entire column or position where you want to change commas to periods in Word.
Step 2: Here, press Ctrl + H to bring up the Find And Replace dialog box.
- In the Find what: line: Enter the value you want to replace, which is a comma.
- In the Replace with: line: Enter the replacement value, which is a period.
Then you click on Replace All to change commas to periods in Word entirely.
The system will search and ask if you want to change commas to periods in Word for the entire area you have selected or not, please choose yes.
Next, the system will ask if you want to search from the beginning and change everything, here you will click on No because if you choose Yes, it will search the entire document, not just the area you have selected. If this is a document with hundreds of instances of commas, this feature will change all of them.
Step 3: Finally, exit the Replace feature and you will have the entire commas changed to periods in Word without affecting other positions.
With a few basic steps, we have completed changing commas to periods in Word. This Replace feature is available in all versions of Word 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007, 2003 and uses the Ctrl + H shortcut to open. Therefore, readers please note and apply it with the Word version you are using.
Through this, we also see the importance of using keyboard shortcuts in Word. Using Word keyboard shortcuts helps us save a lot of time, and with Word shortcuts, instead of having to find the positions of functions, we just need to press the corresponding shortcut key to get the result.
