I wrote about Find a while ago, and thought I should add a bit here about replace as well.
The real power of Find and Replace is the Find, so do go and check out that post if you didn’t see it.
But Replace has its own tricks that are worth noting.
The first is that you can Replace one at a time, or everything at once.
Depending on your situation one option will be better than the other. Sometimes, despite all the options in the Find, you can’t specify what you are looking for without also finding some things that you are not looking for. This is where it is handy to be able to NOT replace-everything-all-at-once and be able to cast your eye on each found item and decide for yourself whether to replace, or not.
To bring up the dialogue box, I normally do Ctrl + F, to get the Find box, and then click on the Replace tab. I just can’t seem to remember that the shortcut key is Ctrl + H.
If you click Find Next, you will go to the first instance of what you are looking for. Then you can decide to click Find Next again, to go to the next one without replacing, or you can click Replace, which will do the swap and take you to the next value. You can continue doing this until you have found all the items that need replacement.
The other option is Replace All. This doesn’t muck around. It will find all the instances and swap all of them. It will report back at the end of how many replacements have been made. This is great, when you have to replace something and there are 2,000 (or way more) instances it is very satisfying to click that Replace All, and have it done!
Also, worth noting is that you can specify the formatting of your replacement value, including getting the format from a cell. So, you can set things up, just the way you want in a cell, and use find and replace to make all the cells that you want to look like that one.