Selecting All Hebrew Text in an English and Hebrew Word Document

Question

I have a document with both English and Hebrew text. I want to select all the Hebrew text at the same time so I don't have to go in and find and highlight the Hebrew manually in order to change the font to something more legible. There should be a way to select all the text in a given language.

Based on some other research, I should be able to do this by going to Find>Format>Language and selecting Hebrew; however, this is not working. Moreover, Word is not identifying the Hebrew text as Hebrew, so even if using Find should work, Word is not identifying the Hebrew in order to be able to find it. Any suggestions?

I have Hebrew set up as an authoring language and even tried setting it to the preferred language. The text is still identified as English.

Edit: I tried setting some of the Hebrew text to be marked as Hebrew, but Word immediately re-marked it as English. I accidentally found some kind of solution, though. I wanted to remove all the vowel pointings (niqqud) from the text to make it easier to read, and so I copied and pasted all the text (English and Hebrew together) to another program (Logos Bible Software, whence came the English and Hebrew together originally) that would remove the vowel pointings from the Hebrew leaving only the consonants. After I replaced all the text with the new form, Word identified the Hebrew text without vowels as Hebrew and the English text as English. It seems to have depended on either the presence of the vowel pointings or something involved in the process of pasting the altered text back in. As a test, I tried repeating the process of pasting English and pointed Hebrew text into my document, but Word is now detecting the pointed Hebrew text as Hebrew. I don't know what changed. The problem seems to have disappeared somehow.

Answer 1

The Find > Format > Language is not searching the document for Hebrew words. It is searching the document for text that has the proofing language set to Hebrew.

If the Hebrew text was added to the document while the document language was set to English, simply changing the document language to Hebrew wouldn't affect the existing text. To do that, you would need to highlight the Hebrew text and then in the Review tab click on Language and then Set Proofing Language.

This may not be very helpful; for this document but, for future mixed language documents you may consider creating styles specifically for Hebrew content. They can be based on the existing styles used for English but tied to the Hebrew language. In this way, you can modify formatting across the document for various elements without having English formatting affecting Hebrew and vice versa.