In a small table like this it's not especially helpful, but in a large table, it's a good way to quickly find cells marked with a specific format. For example, you could flag certain cells with specific formatting, and use Find to locate all flagged cells. This also means you can use Find in creative ways. Excel find and replace allows you to quickly search all cells and formulas in a spreadsheet for all instances that match your search criteria. This means that you can use Find and Replace to update formats globally. Find and replace Find and Replace in Excel Learn how to search in Excel - this step by step tutorial will teach how to Find and Replace in Excel spreadsheets using Ctrl + F shortcut. Then, let's remove Ann and Anna.Įven without text to search for, Excel can still find and replace formats. Now let's adjust the Find and Replace options to work with the format only. In this case, it doesn't make any difference, because Excel is still able to find cells that contain only Ann. Let's undo those changes and see what happens if we remove formatting from the Find criteria. We can now click Find Next, then click Replace. We'll use Anna for 'Replace with,' and then set a format of a blue fill, with a green border. Let's also add a format to match the orange fill we've just applied. Let's look for Ann, and select 'Match entire cell contents.' Now let's open the Find and Replace dialog box and set up our Find options. To understand how find and replace works with formatting, let's use the name table, and the example of replacing Ann with Anna.īefore we replace any values, let's add an orange fill to all cells that contain Ann. Enter the replacement word or phrase in the second field. Enter a word or phrase in the first field. You can even ignore values and just work with the format itself. in the toolbar, then choose Show Find & Replace. One of Excel's really useful features is the ability to find and replace values based on formatting.

Where is find and replace in mac excel