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Now, the find and replace functionality allows you to find all the instances of a particular search term and then do a mass edit on those instances. This proves to be a huge time savers especially when you have large data sets like this one. For our first example, we will keep it simple. Say that we want to replace all the instances of CO with the full state name Colorado. This is very easy to do.

I am going to find and select click on replace. Now, you will notice that the same dialog box opens when I select replace. This is because the find and replace functionality typically go hand and hand. The find dialog we were working with previously is actually here on this dialog box in the separate tab. This is what we are working with previously. Now, we work with replace. In the replace dialog, you will notice that there is an extra input box here, replace with. So, the idea here is to say find what and replace with. What I am going to do is am going to say I want to find all instance of CO. Now, the letter CO can actually be part of a word for example, company. So, what I want to do here is I want to find all of the cells that have CO as the entire cell contents and you will notice here that that has already check matched the entire cell contents. If I uncheck this and run find and replace without this option selected, Excel will replace every instance of CO no matter if it is part of word or not with just one that I am replacing it with.

I will select match entire cell content so that will not happen and then I enter in the term that I am going to replace CO with and that term is Colorado. Now, I have got two options here. I can either select replace all right now and just go ahead and replace all of the instance of CO right of to that or I can go through a couple one by to make sure that I have got my search term correct. Obviously, it is generally a good practice to kind of test out your search terms before you pull the trigger on all of them So, what I am going to do here is I am just going to select to find next first and this going to find CO. If I select replace, it will replace that instance. It looks like my search terms are correct so now, I can pull the trigger and replace all of them. I will click on the replace all button here and Excel tells me it made 28 replacements. Look at this dialog box. This is a great secondary indicator on whether or not your search terms were correct. For example, if this dialog box told me that Excel has made 500 replacements, I will know that something is wrong because I know that there are not 500 Colorado's in here but at this point looks like everything went okay and so I will just press the okay button here and I will close this out. We have performed our first find and replace.

Now, the find and replace functionality allows you to find all the instances of a particular search term and then do a mass edit on those instances. This proves to be a huge time savers especially when you have large data sets like this one. For our first example, we... click to read more