Find & Replace in Excel

You can use Excel's find feature to quickly find specific text. You can use Excel's replace feature to quickly find specific text and replace it with other text.

Find

To quickly find specific text, open the accompanied Excel file, and execute the following steps.

1. Click on Home, Find & Select, and select Find from the drop-down list.

The 'Find and Replace' dialog box appears.

2. Type the text you want to find. For example, type Brown.

3. Click on Find Next.

Excel selects the first occurrence of the specific text.

4. Click on 'Find Next' if this is not the record you are looking for.

Excel selects the second occurrence of the specific text.

5. To get a list of all the occurrences of the specific text, click on 'Find All' in the dialog box.

Replace

To quickly find specific text and replace it with other text, execute the following steps.

1. Click on Home, Find & Select, and select Replace from the drop-down list.

The 'Find and Replace' dialog box appears again (now selecting the Replace tab for you).

2. Type the text you want to find. For example, type Johnson (this is a misspelling).

3. Type the text  you want to replace the text found. Type Johnsen (this is the correct spelling).

4. Click on 'Find Next' as much as you want. No replacement will be made.

5. Click on 'Replace' if you want to make a single replacement of an occurrence.

6. Click on 'Replace all' to replace all occurrences of the text.

Result:

Advanced Find Features

Click on Options in the 'Find and Replace' dialog box to access some more advanced find features.

1. Type the text you want to find. For example, type Brown.

2. Select Workbook from the Within drop-down list to find occurrences across all the worksheets.

3. Checking "Match case" will make your search case-specific. For example, it will only find Brown and not brown.

4. Checking "Match entire cell contents' will only find cells which contain exactly "Brown". For example, cells that contain "Sales Brown", "Brownn" or even "Brown " will not be found.

Furthermore,

5. Use the ? (question mark) to find text with a single unknown character. For example, J?nes will find Jones, Jines, Janes, etc. Use the * (asterisk) to find text with multiple unknown characters. For example, J*nes will find Jones, Joones, Jooones, Jaaaaaanes, etc.

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