Did you notice in MS Word the Replace tab just behind the Find tab? Or in Excel and PowerPoint, did you notice the Replace button?
I bet you’re wondering what it’s all about?
It’s a great function to use in conjunction with the Find.
Let’s suppose that you finished a huge paper and just figured out that you spelled a name wrong, through the entire document, ugh…
What do you do?
You could search for the word by hand and then fix them all one at a time. You could use the Find tip above to locate the misspelled words and then fix them one at a time.
Or… you could use the “Find and Replace” option.
In the Find section of this window, you enter the data that needs to be found. (The misspelled word in this scenario, but it could be an old date that you need to replace, a name, a figure, etc… I’m sure you get the idea.)
Then you enter the new data in the Replace With section. (This would be the name spelled correctly, the new date, etc.)
The next step is to decide when you want the program to replace the information.
If you click on the Find button, the program will locate the first occurrence of the Find data and stop. Then you can click Replace and the program automatically takes out the old data and inserts the new information from the Replace with field.
You can continue to use the Find Next button to authorize the replacements one at a time.
Or, you can choose to have the computer do all replacements automatically. (This one is good for misspelled names as mentioned above.)
If at any time you click on the Replace All button, the program goes through and does the replacements without asking permission for each one. (You want to be careful with this one though. If you really don’t want ALL the occurrences of a word changed then DON’T click this; it replaces them ALL.)
Again, as with the Find window, each program will have a slightly different set of choices, but, as I said before, they’re pretty self-explanatory.
Well, there you go. Now you can streamline your searches.
Definitely a quicker solution than yelling, “Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are!” at your computer.