89. Find and Replace Text  BEFORE YOU BEGIN 82 Open an Existing Presentation
 SEE ALSO 90 Format Presentation Text 91 Animate Text
When you work with large presentations, being able to locate text quickly, either to edit the text or to verify its accuracy, is vital . You don't want to step through a presentation slide by slide until you find text you want to see. As with all of the OpenOffice.org programs, Impress offers a powerful find-and-replace command that enables you to locate text you want to find. Once Impress locates the text, you can request that Impress automatically replace it. If, for example, you realize that your company's Vice President's name is spelled McGuire instead of MacGuire , you can quickly make Impress change all the misspelled instances of the name, even if you're about to start your presentation in the next minute. (Just make sure you don't pass out those preprinted handouts of your slides!) | 1. | Find Text
Select the Find & Replace option from the Edit menu to display the Find & Replace dialog box. You can also press Ctrl+F to display the Find & Replace dialog box.
| | 2. | Enter the Search Text Type the data you want to find in the Search for text box. If you've searched for the same data before, you can click the down arrow to open the Search for drop-down list box and select the data to search for it once again. 89. Find and Replace Text  | | 3. | Start the Search
Click the Find button. Impress searches from the current position in the presentation to the end of the presentation and then prompts you to continue the search from the beginning of the document. If Impress finds the text anywhere in the presentation, it displays the first slide that holds that text.
| | 4. | Replace the Text
If you want Impress to replace found text with new text, type the new text into the Replace with text box.
If the Search for text is found, Impress replaces that text with the text you entered in the Replace with text box.
| | 5. | Replace All Occurrences If you click the Replace All button, Impress replaces all the matches with your replacement text throughout the slide. Such a change is more global and possibly riskier because you may replace text you didn't really want replaced . By clicking Find before each Replace , you can be sure that the proper text is being replaced, but such a single-occurrence find-and-replacement operation takes a lot of time in a long presentation.  TIP You can use the Whole words only option if you don't want Impress to find words that are contained within other words. If, for example, you want to find instances of the word in , you probably don't want to find every word that contains the letter combination in . | | 6. | Modify the Search
Click the More Options button to expand the dialog box so that you can further refine your search. For example, you can click to select the Backwards option before doing a find or replacement if you want to find or replace starting from the insertion point and looking back to the start of the presentation. If you want to search for an approximate match instead of an exact one, select the Similarity option and then click the x button. For example, if you think you might have misspelled vice president McGuire's name even beyond MacGuire , you can use the Similarity Search dialog box to search for words that differ from MacGuire by two letters ; the Similarity Search will then find words such as MagGuire and McaGuire .
When you finish finding and replacing all the text for this search session, close the Find & Replace dialog box and return to the presentation by clicking the dialog box's Close button.
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