Find and Replace

< Day Day Up >

This feature is horribly underused. It’s a great tool for everyone. Most of us know how to use it, but how many of us have hit the More and Special buttons?

Hit Ctrl+H to bring up the Find/Replace dialog.

Tip 7: Don’t Under-Use Find & Replace

Depending on what you’re cleaning up, the order in which you do the finds/replaces can help you work out a great method. If you’re constantly cleaning up similar files, you can record your find and replace steps as a macro.

Here are just a few things that make the Find and Replace feature far more useful than many have thought.

As you read, note that the characters such as ^l and ^t are codes that can be found by choosing them under the More Special buttons. After you use them a time or two, you’ll find yourself remembering them.

You received an email and you’d like to put it into a document. The text comes out all weird and it doesn’t wrap.
1. First, paste your text by using Edit → Paste Special, as Unformatted text.
2. Hit Ctrl+H.
3. Type ^ l (that’s a carat—above the 6 key, followed by a lower-case L) into the Find What box.
4. In the Replace With box, type a space.
5. Hit Replace All. Pasted email text generally uses line breaks instead of paragraph markers as line returns.
6. You’ll see the difference when you turn your Show/Hide button on; a line break character looks like this:
Be creative. Do you constantly find too many spaces between words while writing or formatting?
1. Hit Ctrl+H.
2. Type two spaces into the Find What box.
3. In the Replace With box, type a single space. Hit Replace All.
4. Continue to hit Replace All until zero replacements are made. If you like the “two spaces after a colon” format, then follow up by finding a colon and a space, and replacing it with a colon and two spaces.
Someone gave you a document that has two columns of tabbed data. Now, you need to add some items to the lists, but you prefer to use tables. You know that to easily convert this list into a table, you need only one tab between the items in the columns (see Turning Tabbed Columns into a Data File on page 8-4), but the writer places two or three tabs because they used the default tabs instead of setting it up properly.
1. Select the entire list.
2. Hit Ctrl+H.
3. In the Find What box, type ^ t^ t (this denotes two tab characters).
4. In the Replace With box, type ^ t (one tab character).
5. Hit Replace All continuously until zero replacements are made.
You’ve got a document that uses styles. But you’ve found it needs to use the styles from another document. You use the Organizer to copy the styles into your document. But how can you easily replace the Heading1 style you used with the H1 style that was used by the other formatter?
1. Hit Ctrl+H.
2. Hit the More button.
3. Hit Format then Style.
4. Hit the letter H to go to the beginning of the styles that start with that letter and choose Heading1.
5. Click in the Replace With box, select Format then Style.
6. Hit the letter H again and choose the style named H1. Don’t type anything in the Find What or Replace With boxes.
7. Hit Replace All.
  
  This is a simple way to add an additional heading style as well. You may find that your document is to be one of many and you’re asked to change your heading styles to be one level lower than they are now. So, you replace Heading 4 with Heading 5, Heading 3 with Heading 4, Heading 2 with Heading 3 and then Heading 1 with Heading 2.
  
  Notice the order in which they’re replaced. Again, the order of your finds and replaces can be very important, while allowing you to be very creative with the tool.

< Day Day Up >