Can I search for a word in a Pages document?

Last reviewed: October 10, 2026 · Markdown version

Yes. On a Mac, open the document, click the View button in Pages' toolbar and choose Show Find & Replace, or press Command-F, then type the word; every match is highlighted and the arrows step through them. Pages for iCloud in a browser works almost the same way. On an iPhone the command is under the More button, and our page on finding a word in a document already has Apple's iPhone steps, so this page covers the Mac, the browser, and replacing.

Pages on a Mac

Apple's steps: click the View menu button "in the toolbar, then choose Show Find & Replace", or "press Command-F", and "Enter a word or phrase in the search field. Matches are highlighted as you enter text." To tighten the search, open the pop-up menu to the left of the field and "choose either Whole Words or Match Case (or both)"; with Whole Words on, Apple notes, a search for under skips underline. Earlier searches are kept: "To see or clear recent searches", click the Search Options button in the field (Find and replace text in Pages on Mac, Pages User Guide, read 10 October 2026).

Apple is also specific about where it looks. "All content in the document — the main body text, headers and footers, tables, text boxes, shapes, footnotes and endnotes, and comments — is included in the search." Tables come with a catch: "In a table cell, Pages matches only the value that’s displayed, not the underlying value or formula", so in Apple's recipe example a search for "0.5" finds nothing where the cell shows "1/2".

Replacing what you found

On the Mac, choose Find & Replace from the same pop-up menu and a second field appears. Apple notes that "the number of matches appears alongside" the word as you type, which is a quick way to see how often it occurs. Then you can "click Replace All", or use "Replace & Find" to go one match at a time. Two warnings from the same page: "Leaving the bottom text field blank deletes all instances of the found text", and "You can’t replace matching text in table cells that contain a formula" (the Find and replace text in Pages on Mac page above).

Pages for iCloud, in a browser

The web version uses the same menu name: "Click the View button in the toolbar, then choose Show Find & Replace", with "Command-F (on a Mac) or Control-F (on a Windows device)" as the shortcut. Whole Words and Match Case sit behind a Settings button to the left of the Find field. Apple's list of what it searches differs slightly from the Mac's: "the document body, headers and footers, tables, text boxes, shapes, image captions, and footnotes and endnotes", with comments not named. And in a shared document set to View Only you "click the Find button in the toolbar" and "can search for, but not replace, a word or phrase" (Find and replace text in Pages for iCloud, Pages for iCloud User Guide, read 10 October 2026).

When you do not know which document it is in

Find & Replace searches the document that is open. If the word could be in any of a dozen Pages files, the iPhone's document manager can search by content, which the same page as above quotes. On a Mac, the system-wide routes are Spotlight and the Finder; our Mac search page covers what Apple says they look at. If the document was exported to PDF, a search inside the PDF is a different tool again; searching for a word in a PDF explains it.