Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Spruce up Your Excel Spreadsheets with Find and Replace”.
In this article, you’re going to learn how to use the excel, find and replace tool to spruce up your excel spreadsheets to change up the look and feel and the readability and just about every visual aspect of your excel spreadsheet. So here we have a spreadsheet. That is a budget tracker and planner and let’s say it’s for a small business that helps put on events but as the small business owner. Maybe i want to customize the look and feel of this spreadsheet to match the business that i’m working with or the event that is going to be put on, and in this case the next event is a wedding dinner, so making sure that i’ve clicked somewhere in My spreadsheet i’m going to hold ctrl and tap f to bring up the find and replace window. As you probably already know, you can use, find and replace to either just find certain things. So i can type here. Let’S say chairs click find next, and it found that in my spreadsheet, so that’s one way to use this. You can also click here and do a find and replace. So i could find chairs and replace it with something else in this case how about instead of just the word event. Maybe i want to replace that with wedding dinner, i’ll click replace all and now every instance of the word event has been changed to wedding dinner. Making it much more specific, it changed it here. It changed it here. It may have changed it in other places as well notice, though, that it did not affect the name of the tab here or the spreadsheet name. So i could change that manually, just double clicking and changing it now in this article i’m not focused so much on finding and replacing words or data numbers. Instead, let’s move beyond that. I’M going to remove the text that i’ve put here i’ll just delete that out and i’m going to scoot this up above a little bit just so you can see all the colors in the spreadsheet. What i’d like to do now is not find and replace words or data, but find and replace colors.
Let’S say the bright and groom have chosen for their colors, not these two different shades of blue, but something else what you could do is leave this completely blank. The find what instead go over here to format and click, and it brings up this window with all of these different format, options that we have in excel. These are all different things that excel can find or look for in the spreadsheet, different alignments font types and in this case we’re dealing with color fill color. To be specific – and i think this is the darker blue that we see here.
If i’m not sure, i could choose format from a cell to get exactly the right color, but i think it’s this one. I’Ll click, ok and notice that this preview has been updated so excel is going to find any example of this color blue and it’s going to replace it right now with nothing. So, let’s change that i’ll click on format and let’s say the happy couple has discussed it and they’d like their colors to be bright, orange and yellow. So, let’s start with bright orange i’ll click, there click, ok and then replace all all done.
There were 63 replacements made now it may not seem like 63 changes were made there, but it really was 63.. Why is that? Well, because each of these, in some cases, is a different cell and so changing the color of that cell is one change, looks like this is just one big merged and centered cell, so that probably just counted as one change, but without using find and replace. I would have had to have clicked and dragged to select either a range of the cells that i wanted to change the color of, or i could have just clicked one at a time and changed each one one at a time. But anyway, after selecting, i would have had to go up here and manually click to choose the color to change it to it would have taken quite some time more time than it took to just use, find and replace.
Now, if that’s all the change i need. I could just click close and be done, but i’m going to bring it up again. Ctrl f brings up, find and replace. I do want to replace so i click on the replace tab.
This time, i’m going to switch the colors. I want to find this lighter blue, that’s the secondary color, so i click ok and i want to replace it with this beautiful yellow. So i select it click, ok, click replace all and again it worked great. All done we made 15 replacements. I can click close. So now the happy couple when i send them the wedding dinner expense list, they’ll really be pleased to see their wedding colors in the spreadsheet. Now i want you to know that this would also work for font colors. So if we look at the font color for this text here i click on the cell.
I go up here to the font color. It looks like it’s not quite black. It’S like a dark blue. Well, if i’d like to change that again, ctrl f i’ll go to replace.
Now it’s very important that, as i make additional changes to this spreadsheet, that i watch out for the selections that i made in the past. So i just recently put these colors in and made that change. I need to watch out for that. I need to clear that out.
So i’m going to click here on format and i’ll choose clear to get rid of that color choice there, because this time it’s not about the fill color it’s about the font color, so i click on font and i’m looking for a very specific font color. It’S this one here i click, ok and i want to replace it with a very specific font color now i almost forgot to go here to fill and clear out the yellow fill it’s important that i do that. Okay, back in font, i’m going to click! Ok, replace all all done.
We made nine replacements. Now, let’s look at the font color when i click on the cell, i go up here and click and it’s the automatic color which is black, that’s the one i had selected and that’s also true of any other instance in which i had used this color. It’S been changed to actual black. Now, let’s try one other change using, find and replace i’m going to click here on format. I’M going to clear out the format changes that i made in the past and i’m going to select the font that we currently have in the spreadsheet, so constantia. I’Ve selected that i click ok and i would like to replace that with a different font. So i’ll click format here this is what i want it to be replaced with how about this font. So i select it. I click.
Ok, it gives me a preview of the change. I could click replace all or i could just click replace and one at a time the replacements are going to be made but notice. How big this spreadsheet is it’s going to take a while to replace each and every cell, even the blank cells, so, instead of replace one at a time, i’m going to go ahead and click replace all and, as you can see, all of the fonts have been Changed from constantia to this new font abadi, i don’t know how to pronounce that, as i click throughout the data, you can see that all of the text has been changed to this new font now because of the font change you can see, there are some error Messages these hashtags just mean that the data can’t fit within the width of the column, so i’ll, just double click between g and h.
That provides the perfect amount of space now i’ll. Double click between h and i same thing and between m and n, and so at this point i have a spreadsheet that has been completely spruced up. The look and feel has changed quite a bit and it matches the audience that i created it for so i hope you can see how easily and quickly we can use the find and replace tool in microsoft excel to spruce up a spreadsheet either to make it Look nicer or to make it match either the purpose or the audience the customer that it’s going to be used for thanks for watching. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did please like follow and subscribe and when you do click the bell.
So you’ll be notified when i post another video, if you’d like to support my channel, consider clicking the thanks button below the video or you can support me through my patreon account, or by buying channel merch and you’ll, see more information about those options in the description Below the video speaking of patreon, i’d like to give a quick shout out to my five dollar patreon supporters. Thank you. So much for all you do to support the channel. I really appreciate it. .