MS Excel: How To Find And Replace In Excel

How to use Find in Excel, is simple and easy to learn. Follow the steps to easily use the Find in Excel:

• Select Find & Select option available at the top right corner of the screen in the Home tab of Excel worksheet.
• Click on the Find option from list.
• You can also use a shortcut of the Find feature that is ctrl + f using a keyboard.
• Now, a dialogue box will open with Find and Replace properties and by default Find is selected.
• In the Find & Replace dialogue box:
  • Enter text or any value that you want to search or find in the worksheet of Excel.
  • Click on the Next button to search next (Next will search for the next appearance of the value given the textbox of the Find dialogue box in the current Excel worksheet).
Extract Find All
• If wants to find all the text occurrences of a particular value then you have to simply click on the Find All button, available on the Find & Replace dialogue box. By clicking the Find All button a list of all values with corresponding cells will appear on the Excel worksheet.

Basic Excel Replace Feature

MS Excel’s Replace feature is used to replace a particular value in the worksheet of the Excel. Using Replace feature, the work of Excel worksheet becomes more easy and time saving.

How to use Replace in Excel, is simple and easy to learn. Follow the steps to easily use the Replace in Excel:

• Select Find & Select option available at the top right corner of the screen in the Home tab of the Excel worksheet.
• Click on the Replace option from list.
• You can also use a shortcut of the Replace feature that is ctrl + h using a keyboard.
• Now, a dialogue box will open with Find and Replace properties and by default, Replace is selected.
• In the Find & Replace dialogue box:
  • Enter text or any value that you want to replace in the current worksheet of Excel.
  • Click on the Replace button to replace particular text with another text (Replace button will replace the particular appearance of the value given in the textbox of the Replace dialogue box in the current Excel worksheet).
Excel Replace All
• If wants to Replace all the text occurrences of a particular value then you have to simply click on the Replace All button, available on the Find & Replace dialogue box. By clicking Replace All button an alert pop-up will notify that “All finished. We made 5 replacements” as shown in below image of the Excel worksheet.

Find Within A Specified Range Of Cells

Excel also provides a functionality, if you want to search in a particular range of the worksheet then select the range of the cells before going to search or Find.

Example, refer the below image, where the value cells are A1-A10. Therefore, the Find feature will work only in the selected range that is A2-A7 and if searching for “Blogs” text then the Find feature will find a text only in A2 and A5 cells but not be able to find text in A1, and A8 cells.

Excel Additional Find Options

Excel’s Find & Replace dialogue contains many options using which you can refine the Find & Replace command. To open multiple options of Find and Replace you have to do the same as mentioned below steps:

• Click on the Find & Select option present at the top right corner of the screen.
• Now, Click on the Find or Replace option. Here in the image, we are going further with the Find option, but you can select Replace as well.
• Here, you can see a button "Options" Click on this button to see more options.
• To know about each option in detail, refer to mentioned explanation about the options.

Excel Find Within Option

Excel Find Within option is used to find particular values in the current worksheet or can also search throughout the workbook of Excel. Basically "Within" has two options one is "Sheet" and another is "Workbook", you can use one of the options according to your requirements.

Excel Find Search: Option

Excel Find Search option is used to decide the order in which the user wants to search on the other hand "Search" option contains two options, explained below in detail:

• If you choose the option "By Rows", Excel will search using the row pattern which means, first, it will search in a row and complete before going to the next row.
• If you choose the option "By Columns", Excel will search using the column pattern which means, first it will search in a column and complete before going to the next column.

Excel Find Look in: Option

Excel Find Look In option is used to decide what to search for in an Excel worksheet (i.e. value, formula, or comments). Let’s have details about these options:

• Formulas: Using this option, search only a cell of text that makes up the formula (not the result of the formula)
• Values: This option is used to search the cell that contains the result of the formula but not the actual formula (Note: This option is not available in the Replace tab).
• Comments: This is used to search only comments, and ignore the other content of the Excel worksheet (Note: This option is not available in the Replace tab).

Excel Find Match Case Checkbox

Excel Find Match Case checkbox is basically used to make the Find search case-sensitive. So, Excel will search for the same text (Case-Sensitive) in the Excel worksheet.

• If you select the checkbox of "Match Case" that means Excel will Find in the worksheet with a Case-Sensitive search.
• If you do not select the checkbox of "Match Case" that means Excel will not Find in the worksheet with a Case-Sensitive search.

Excel Find Entire Cells Only Option

Excel Find Entire Cells Only checkbox is used when the user wants to match the entire text of the cell while using the Find command except search any part of the cell.

• If the Find Entire Cells Only checkbox is selected that means the Find command will search whether the entire cell value is matched with the search text or not.
• If the Find Entire Cells Only checkbox is not selected that means the Find command will search any part of the cell containing a value that is matched with the search text or not