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How can you make your work easier by leveraging the Find and Replace features in
Excel? Hi, I'm Dawn Bjork, The Software Pro.
I'm also a Microsoft Certified Trainer and a Certified Excel Expert.
Let's look at different ways to save time by using Excel's Find and Replace
features to their full potential.
Excel's Find and Replace features are great time savers,
especially with worksheets that might span thousands of rows and columns.
Hidden in these features are options which simplify how you can navigate and
change your Excel data. Let's start first with the Find command,
and this might be something that you're using every day.
The easiest ways to launch that are either with CTRL+F or in our
Home tab, we look for Find under Find and Select.
From here, specify what you're looking for.
I want to Find All the occurrences of Admin.
To put more power behind your Find and Replace commands,
open up Options from here.
We might want to specify that we want to search the entire workbook
or match the case.
Because perhaps we're looking for a lower case version to change it to upper
case.
And do you want to limit only to those cells that have only that content
or perhaps it's part of a lengthier entry.
Now this will search whether it's in formulas or simply data entry,
text values,
so you can decide exactly how you want to work with this. For right now,
I'll simply choose Find Next. Now that could be a little bit tedious,
especially if we have a lot of occurrences.
Here's one of the ways you can get a lot more power out of the Find and Find and
Replace. Choose Find All.
Now we see all of the matches where this entry
occurs. This will help you,
especially if you choose to do a Find and Replace,
you might discover some things that you had forgotten about or didn't realize
were in that worksheet or even in that workbook. The nice thing about this too,
let's say you were looking for a project code or an identifier,
you can move right to it by simply moving to
this as a hyperlink.
And now Excel will take you right to that location.
This can make it much faster for you to find the content you're looking for.
For this, if I wanted to isolate it,
I might say Match entire cell contents.
Now we try the Find All and I get a much smaller subset of
that. The Replace command is also available from this dialog box.
We could find it or move to it from Excel by either
pressing CTRL+H, the keyboard shortcut, or once again,
finding it in the Home tab under Find and Select. For this one,
I'd like to find Admin.
only where it appears in that department.
And I'll replace it with Administration.
For that, I could once again,
look at the Find All just to confirm that I'm not going to be replacing
anything else. And this is another time-saver.
If we can check our work ahead of time,
we're less likely to have to go Find Next, Replace, Find Next, Replace.
Instead, I'll Replace All.
How would this help you save time?
Let's look at another variation on that.
Find and replace can help you with formatting.
Maybe you have data that had been previously manually formatted with a
highlight or bold or a color, and you'd like to change those,
or you'd like to find specific content and apply a format to it.
For this one,
I will look for all occurrences of Blue.
And what I want to do with that is replace that
with the color blue.
We can choose then Format from this where you can even choose
formatting from an existing cell, but I'll dig into this a little bit more so.
And from the Format dialog box,
I'll change the font here and pick the color to be blue.
Additionally, I'll make that bold italics
and then we'll go ahead and OK.
Here's a preview of what it will look like.
I might want to just simply say, Find All, show me,
so I'm not going to be changing something I didn't intend to.
And now I'll go ahead and Replace All.
As you can see here,
we've leveraged Find and Replace to be able to
also work with formatting.
Now you've seen how to save time and effort by taking advantage of the Find and
Replace features in Excel.
For more tips and shortcuts and being productive with Excel,
head to TheSoftwarePro.com/Excel.
If this training was helpful, please like,
and comment on this video and subscribe to this channel. This is Dawn Bjork,
The Software Pro. Thanks for watching.
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