OpenOffice Writer has a Find and Replace feature that helps to locate for a text inside a document and replace it with another word. In addition to finding and replacing words and phrases, you can also use wildcards and regular expressions to perform advanced search. To search a word
1. Click Edit → Find & Replace (or) Ctrl + F
2. The Find & Replace dialog box appears.
Steps to find & replace a text
- Type the text you want to find in the Search for box.
Eg: To search a word “Bombay” in a document and replace with “Mumbai”, enter the word “Bombay” in the Search for box.
- To replace the text with different text, type the new text in the Replace with box.
Enter the word “ Mumbai” in the Replace with box and Click Find button, to start the search, the found word is highlighted and the first occurance of “Bombay” is highlighted.
- To replace text, click Replace button. The highlighted word is replaced with the word given in the Replace with box.
- Click Find All, Writer selects all instances of the search text in the document. All occurrences of Bombay are highlighted.
- Click Replace All button, Writer replaces all matches. This will replace all occurances of “Bombay” with “Mumbai”.
- Enable Match case to perform the search case sensitively so that uppercase and lower cases are distinguished separately.
- Enable Whole Words only to make the search more specific to words used separately alone.
