In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Find and Replace in Excel to search for specific data in a worksheet or workbook, and what you can do with those cells after finding them. We will also explore the advanced features of Excel search such as wildcards, finding cells with formulas or specific formatting, find and replace in all open workbooks and more.

1. How To Find And Replace Text In Word 2016
2. Mac Excel Find And Select
3. Search And Replace Text In Autocad
4. Find And Replace Text In Excel For Mac

When working with big spreadsheets in Excel, it's crucial to be able to quickly find the information you want at any particular moment. Scanning through hundreds of rows and columns is certainly not the way to go, so let's have a closer look at what the Excel Find and Replace functionality has to offer.

MS Excel provides Find & Replace option for finding text within the sheet. Find and Replace Dialogue. Let us see how to access the Find & Replace Dialogue. To access the Find & Replace, Choose Home → Find & Select → Find or press Control + F Key.See the image below. Click the “Replace” tab in the left column and fill in the two blank spaces. In this case we shall enter “this” in the “find” field and “the” in the “and replace with” field. Enable “batch replace” and click the “Apply” button and you will be off and running.

• How to use Find in Excel
• How to use Replace in Excel

How to use Find in Excel

Below you will find an overview of the Excel Find capabilities as well as the detailed steps on how to use this feature in Microsoft Excel 2016, 2013, 2010 and older versions.

Find value in a range, worksheet or workbook

The following guidelines tell you how to find specific characters, text, numbers or dates in a range of cells, worksheet or entire workbook.

1. To begin with, select the range of cells to look in. To search across the entire worksheet, click any cell on the active sheet.
2. Open the Excel Find and Replace dialog by pressing the Ctrl + F shortcut. Alternatively, go to the Home tab > Editing group and click Find & Select > Find…
   
3. In the Find what box, type the characters (text or number) you are looking for and click either Find All or Find Next.
   

When you click Find Next, Excel selects the first occurrence of the search value on the sheet, the second click selects the second occurrence, and so on.

When you click Find All, Excel opens a list of all the occurrences, and you can click any item in the list to navigate to the corresponding cell.

Excel Find - additional options

To fine-tune your search, click Options in the right-hand corner of the Excel Find & Replace dialog, and then do any of the following:

• To search for the specified value in the current worksheet or entire workbook, select Sheet or Workbook in the Within.
• To search from the active cell from left to right (row-by-row), select By Rows in the Search To search from top to bottom (column-by-column), select By Columns.
• To search among certain data type, select Formulas, Values, or Comments in the Look in.
• For a case-sensitive search, check the Match case check.
• To search for cells that contain only the characters you've entered in the Find what field, select the Match entire cell contents.

Find cells with specific format in Excel

To find cells with certain formatting, press the Ctrl + F shortcut to open the Find and Replace dialog, click Options, then click the Format… button in the upper right corner, and define your selections in Excel Find Format dialog box.

If you want to find cells that match a format of some other cell on your worksheet, delete any criteria in the Find what box, click the arrow next to Format, select Choose Format From Cell, and click the cell with the desired formatting.

Find cells with formulas in Excel

With Excel's Find and Replace, you can only search in formulas for a given value, as explained in additional options of Excel Find. To find cells that contain formulas, use the Go to Special feature.

1. Select the range of cells where you want to find formulas, or click any cell on the current sheet to search across the entire worksheet.
2. Click the arrow next to Find & Select, and then click Go To Special. Alternatively, you can press F5 to open the Go To dialog and click the Special… button in the lower left corner.
   
3. In the Go To Special dialog box, select Formulas, then check the boxes corresponding to the formula results you want to find, and click OK:
   • Numbers - find formulas that return numeric values, including dates.
   • Text - search for formulas that return text values.
   • Logicals - find formulas that return Boolean values of TRUE and FALSE.
   • Errors - find cells with formulas that result in errors such as #N/A, #NAME?, #REF!, #VALUE!, #DIV/0!, #NULL!, and #NUM!.

If Microsoft Excel finds any cells that meet your criteria, those cells are highlighted, otherwise a message will be displayed that no such cells have been found.

How to select / highlight / delete all found entries on a sheet

To select all occurrences of a given value on a worksheet, open the Excel Find and Replace dialog, type the search term in the Find What box and click Find All.

Excel will display a list of found entities, and you click on any occurrence in the list (or just click anywhere within the results area to move the focus there), and press the Ctrl + A shortcut. This will select all found occurrences both on the Find and Replace dialog and on the sheet.

Once the cells are selected, you can highlight them by changing the fill color, copy to another sheet by pressing Ctrl + C, and so on.

You can also delete all found cells or rows in one go. For this, right-click the selected cells on a sheet and choose Delete from the context menu. Alternatively, with the cells selected, click the arrow of the Delete button on the Home tab > Cells group, and then click either Delete Cells… to remove individual cells or Delete Sheet Rows to remove entire rows.

If you've changed your mind immediately after deleting the cells, you can get them back by clicking the Undo button on the Excel ribbon or by pressing the Ctrl + Z shortcut.

How to use Replace in Excel

Below you will find the step-by-step guidelines on how to use Excel Replace to change one value to another in a selected range of cells, entire worksheet or workbook.

Replace one value with another

To replace certain characters, text or numbers in an Excel sheet, make use of the Replace tab of the Excel Find & Replace dialog. The detailed steps follow below.

1. Select the range of cells where you want to replace text or numbers. To replace character(s) across the entire worksheet, click any cell on the active sheet.
2. Press the Ctrl + H shortcut to open the Replace tab of the Excel Find and Replace dialog.

   Alternatively, go to the Home tab > Editing group and click Find & Select > Replace…
   

   If you've just used the Excel Find feature, then simply switch to the Replace tab.

3. In the Find what box type the value to search for, and in the Replace with box type the value to replace with.
4. Finally, click either Replace to replace the found occurrences one by one, or Replace All to swap all the entries in one fell swoop.
   

For additional Excel Replace features, click the Options button in the right-hand corner of the Replace tab. They are essentially the same as the Excel Find options we discussed a moment ago.

Replace text or number with nothing

To replace all occurrences of a specific value with nothing, type the characters to search for in the Find what box, leave the Replace with box blank, and click the Replace All button.

How to find or replace a line break in Excel

To replace a line break with a space or any other separator, enter the line break character in the Find what filed by pressing Ctrl + J. This shortcut is the ASCII control code for character 10 (line break, or line feed).

After pressing Ctrl + J, at first sight the Find what box will look empty, but upon a closer look you will notice a tiny flickering dot like in the screenshot below. Enter the replacement character in the Replace with box, e.g. a space character, and click Replace All.

To replace some character with a line break, do the opposite - enter the current character in the Find what box, and the line break (Ctrl + J) in Replace with.

How to change cell formatting on the sheet

In the first part of this tutorial, we discussed how you can find cells with specific formatting using the Excel Find dialog. Excel Replace allows you to take a step further and change the formatting of all cells on the sheet or in the entire workbook.

• Open the Replace tab of Excel's Find and Replace dialog, and click the Options
• Next to the Find what box, click the arrow of the Format button, select Choose Format From Cell, and click on any cell with the format you want to change.
• Next to the Replace with box, either click the Format… button and set the new format using the Excel Replace Format dialog box; or click the arrow of the Format button, select Choose Format From Cell and click on any cell with the desired format.
• If you want to replace the formatting on the entire workbook, select Workbook in the Within box. If you want to replace formatting on the active sheet only, leave the default selection (Sheet).
• Finally, click the Replace All button and verify the result.

Using wildcard characters with Excel Find and Replace

How To Find And Replace Text In Word 2016

The use of wildcard characters, such as an asterisk and a question mark, in your search criteria can automate many find and replace tasks in Excel.

• Use the asterisk (*) to find any string of characters. For example, sm* finds 'Smith' and 'Smythe'.
• Use the question mark (?) to find any single character. For instance, gr?y finds 'Gray' and 'Grey'.

The following screenshot demonstrates how you can find all surnames that begin with 'ad':

How to find and replace wildcard characters in Excel

If you need to find actual asterisks or question marks in your Excel worksheet, type the tilde character (~) before them. For example, to find cells that contain asterisks, you would type ~* in the Find what box. To find cells that contain question marks, use ~? as your search criteria.

This is how you can replace all questions marks (?) on a worksheet with another value (number 1 in this example):

As you see, Excel successfully finds and replaces wildcards both in text and numeric values.

Shortcuts for find and replace in Excel

Mac Excel Find And Select

If you have been closely following the previous sections of this tutorial, you might have noticed that Excel provides 2 different ways to interact with Find and Replace commands - by clicking the ribbon buttons and by using the keyboard shortcuts.

Below there is a quick summary of what you've already learned and a couple more shortcuts that may save you a few more seconds.

• Ctrl+F - Excel Find shortcut that opens the Find tab of the Find & Replace
• Ctrl+H - Excel Replace shortcut that opens the Replace tab of the Find & Replace
• Ctrl+Shift+F4 - find the previous occurrence of the search value.
• Shift+F4 - find the next occurrence of the search value.
• Ctrl+J - find or replace a line break.

Search and replace in all open workbooks

As you have just see, Excel's Find and Replace provides a lot of useful options. However, it can search only in one workbook at a time. To find and replace in all open workbooks, you can use the Advanced Find and Replace add-in by Ablebits.

The following Advanced Find and Replace features make search in Excel even more powerful:

• Find and Replace in all open workbooks or selected workbooks & worksheets.
• Simultaneous search in values, formulas, hyperlinks and comments.
• Exporting search results to a new workbook in a click.

To run the Advanced Find and Replace add-in, click on its icon on the Excel ribbon, which resides on the Ablebits Utilities tab > Search group. Alternatively, you can press Ctrl + Alt + F, or even configure it to open by the familiar Ctrl + F shortcut.

The Advanced Find and Replace pane will open, and you do the following:

• Type the characters (text or number) to search for in the Find what
• Select in which workbooks and worksheets you want to search. By default, all sheets in all open workbooks are selected.
• Choose what data type(s) to look in: values, formulas, comments, or hyperlinks. By default, all data types are selected.

Additionally, you have the following options:

• Select the Match case option to look for case-sensitive data.
• Select the Entire cell check box to search for exact and complete match, i.e. find cells that contain only the characters you've typed in the Find what

Click the Find All button, and you will see a list of found entries on the Search results tab. And now, you can replace all or selected occurrences with some other value, or export the found cells, rows or columns to a new workbook.

If you are willing to try the Advanced Find and Replace on your Excel sheets, don't hesitate to download a fully functional trial version. And if you like it, we are happy to offer you the 15% off coupon code that we've created especially for our blog readers: AB14-BlogSpo. You can use it to get Advanced Find and Replace as a separate product and as part of Ultimate Suite for Excel.

I thank you for reading and hope to see you on our blog next week. In our text tutorial, we will dwell on Excel SEARCH, FIND and REPLACE functions, so please keep watching this space.

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Watch Video – Useful Examples of Using Find & Replace in Excel

Last month, one of my colleagues got a data set in Excel, and he was banging his head to clean it. Since I was the only one in the office at that wee hour, he asked me if I could help. I used a simple technique using Find and Replace in Excel, and his data was all clean and polished. He thanked me, packed up, and left office.

He thanked me, packed up, and left office.

Excel Find and Replace feature is super powerful if you know how to best use it.

Using FIND and REPLACE in Excel (4 Examples)

Find and Replace in Excel can save a lot of time, and that is what matters most these days.

In this blog, I will share 4 amazing tips that I have shared with hundreds of my colleagues in my office. The response is always the same – “I wish I knew this earlier. It could have saved me so much of hard labor”.

#1 To Change Cell References Using Excel Find and Replace

Sometimes when you work with a lot of formulas, there is a need to change a cell reference in all the formulas. It could take you a lot of time if you manually change it in every cell that has a formula.

Here is where Excel Find and Replace comes in handy. It can easily find a cell reference in all the formulas in the worksheet (or in the selected cells) and replace it with another cell reference.

For example, suppose you have a huge dataset with formula in that uses $A$1 as one of the cell references (as shown below). If you need to change $A$1 with $B$1, you can do that using Find and Replace in Excel.

Here are the steps to do this:

1. Select the cells that have the formula in which you want to replace the reference. If you want to replace in the entire worksheet, select the entire worksheet.
2. Go to Home –> Find and Select –> Replace (Keyboard Shortcut – Control + H).
3. In the Find and Replace dialogue box, use the following details:
   • Find what: $A$1 (the cell reference you want to change).
   • Replace with: $B$1 (the new cell reference).
4. Click on Replace All.

This would instantly update all the formulas with the new cell reference.

Note that this would change all the instances of that reference. For example, if you have the reference $A$1 two times in a formula, both the instances would be replaced by $B$1.

#2 To Find and Replace Formatting in Excel

This is a cool feature when you want to replace existing formatting with some other formatting. For example, you may have cells with an orange background color and you want to change all these cell’s background color to red. Instead of manually doing this, use Find and Replace to do this all at once.

Here are the steps to do this:

1. Select the cells for which you want to find and replace the formatting. If you want to find and replace a specific format in the entire worksheet, select the entire worksheet.
2. Go to Home –> Find and Select –> Replace (Keyboard Shortcut – Control + H).
3. Click on the Options button. This will expand the dialogue box and show you more options.
4. Click on the Find what Format button. It will show a drop-down with two options – Format and Choose Format from Cell.
   • You can either manually specify the format that you want to find by clicking on the Format button, or you can select the format from a cell in the worksheet. To select a format from a cell, select the ‘Choose Format from Cell’ option and then click on the cell from which you want to pick the format.
   • Once you select a format from a cell or manually specify it from the format cells dialogue box, you will see that as the preview on the left of the format button.
5. Now you need to specify the format that you want instead of the one selected in the previous step. Click on the Replace with Format button. It will show a drop-down with two options – Format and Choose Format from Cell.
   • You can either manually specify it by clicking on the Format button, or you can pick up an existing format in the worksheet by clicking on the cell that has it.
   • Once you select a format from a cell or manually specify it from the format cells dialogue box, you will see that as the preview on the left of the format button.
6. Click on the Replace All button.

You can use this technique to replace a lot of things in formatting. It can pick up and replace formats such as background color, borders, font type/size/color, and even merged cells.

#3 To Add or Remove Line Break

What do you do when you have to go to a new line in an Excel cell.

You press Alt + Enter.

And what do you do when you want to revert this?

You delete it manually.. isn’t it?

Imagine you have hundreds of line breaks that you want to delete. Deleting each one manually would take ages.

Here is the good news, you don’t need to do this manually. Excel Find and Replace has a cool trick up its sleeves that will make it happen in a snap.

Here are the steps to remove all the line breaks at once:

1. Select the data from which you want to remove the line breaks.
2. Go to Home –> Find and Select –> Replace (Keyboard Shortcut – Control + H).
3. In the Find and Replace Dialogue Box:
   • Find What: Press Control + J (you may not see anything except for a blinking dot).
   • Replace With: Space bar character (hit space bar once).
4. Click on Replace All.

Search And Replace Text In Autocad

And Woosh! It would magically remove all the line breaks from your worksheet.

#4 To Remove Text Using Wildcard Characters

This one saved me hours. I got a list as shown below, and I had to remove the text between parenthesis.

If you have a huge>Session expired

Find And Replace Text In Excel For Mac

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