How to Use OpenOffice Writer's Powerful "Find & Replace" Function

© Ugur Akinci
Imagine you have a 1,000 page document using Arial font in 50 of those one thousand pages. And again imagine that you’d like to use Arial Narrow in those pages. You can make the necessary font changes in a singşe move by using OpenOffice Writer’s (a free program) powerful FIND & REPLACE function.
You can actually do dozens of different find and replace operations as well. That’s why it may save you precious time and effort if you familiarize yourself with the rich features of this OpenOffice utility.
Select Edit > Find & Replace (or press Ctrl + F) to display the default F&R screen:

Enter the text you are searching for into the Search for field and press Find button. If you’d like to find all occurences of that word or phrase, then press Find All.
If you do not want to replace the search text with anything else, leave the Replace with field blank. But if you want to replace the search text, enter a new text into the Replace with field.
After the searched text is found either click Replace (for one instance) or Replace All (to replace all instances).


If you’d like to match case, select that check box. Otherwise OO will find both “key word” and “KEYWORD”. For example, if you want OO to find only upper-case text, enter “KEY WORD” into the Search for field and then select the Match Case check box before pressing the Find button.
If you want OO to find only the whole words but not (for example) the gerund form of a verb, then select the Whole words only check box.
To pğerform a more sophisticated F&R, click the More Options button to reveal more options:

Here you can search for particular fonts and replace them with another font by clicking the Format button:

IMPORTANT: You have to define the desired text format both for the Search for and Replace with fields.


For example, consider the following F&R configuration:

Here, when you click the Find and Replace buttons (in sequence), OO will find the first text string written with Arial Black and replace that font with Microsoft Sans Serif. If you click the Replace All button, all instances of Arial Black will be replaced globally with Microsoft Sans Serif.
The attributes screen that is displayed when you click the Attributes button will similarly allow you to select from dozens of text attrıbutes that you can search for: