How to Use a Find and Replace Tool

Find and replace is one of the most popular tools. This tool searches an entire document for a particular word, character or phrase and then switches it to the word, character or phrase you want. If you weren’t aware you could do this, it can be a brilliant addition to your arsenal and can really make all the difference especially when working on large amounts of text. Let’s take a closer look at this tool.

Reasons to Use Find and Replace Tool

There are many reasons to use a find and replace tool. Here are some examples:

• Adjusting Language – Let’s say you have a document using British English but you want to change this document to be more American English. Therefore, you may want to replace certain words that are spelled differently or replace typically British words with more American words throughout the document.
• Misspelled Words – This will be a useful tool because it allows you to fix spelling mistakes or even wrong words and phrases by replacing them quickly with the right one. 
• Changing a Name – If you have text with someone’s name such as a contract. You can use the find and replace tool to change out there name if need be when writing out a similar or new contract. 

The find and replace tool is important to ensure consistency in your document and you will benefit from using this tool as it will make sure your work looks professional. It will also benefit you by allowing you to increase productivity by avoiding having to scan and manually change out the word, phrase, symbol or name. 

How Do You Use This Function on TextMechanic? 

If you have never used the find and replace function before on TextMechanic you may not be familiar with how to use it. In the first box, “Find this”, enter the text to be found and eventually be replaced. The second box, “Replace with” then will be the text that will be replacing the text you provided in the “Find this” box above. Last but not least, the third box will be your all of you text. Keep in mind that you can copy and paste your text into the box or upload the text if the file is large. 

Other options available:

• Check “Global matching.” to replace all matches. Otherwise, only the first match will be replaced. A funny example of this is on the Office US when Michael Scott replaces every instance of ‘Dwight’ in his script for his movie but misses one of them because he spelt it ‘Dwigt’. Being able to replace every instance of a word or a phrase in a document is a brilliant tool because it allows you to get rid of silly mistakes quickly and without any fuss. 
• Check “Case sensitive.” to make “Find this:” case sensitive.
• Check “Enable regular expression” to enable regular expressions* in both find and replace fields. Regular expressions are user defined “find and replace” patterns such as find a or b to replace with c.

Text Mechanic Online Text Tools

Text Mechanic offers simple, single-task, browser-based text manipulation tools that help you fix any text-related problems. Every text tool comes with directions that make it easy to use no matter which one you need. Check out the full list of text manipulation tools on Text Mechanic today!