When looking for certain words in a 3000-word essay, it is inefficient to go through every word manually. Writer has a Find and Replace feature that automates the process of searching for text inside a document.

In addition to finding and replacing words and phrases, you can:

• Use wildcards and regular expressions to fine-tune a search.
• Find and replace specific formatting.
• Find and replace paragraph styles.

To display the Find & Replace dialog box, use the keyboard shortcut Control+F or select Edit > Find & Replace.

1. Type the text you want to find in the Search for box.
2. To replace the text with different text, type the new text in the Replace with box.
3. You can select various options such as matching the case, matching whole words only, or doing a search for similar words. (See below for some other choices.)
4. When you have set up your search, click Find. To replace text, click Replace instead.

The Find & Replace dialog box

If you click Find All, Writer selects all instances of the search text in the document. Similarly, if you click Replace All, Writer replaces all matches.

Use Replace All with caution; otherwise, you may end up with some hilarious (and highly embarrassing) mistakes. A mistake with Replace All might require a manual, word-by-word, search to fix, if not discovered in time to undo.