Finding and Replacing in Writer

In text documents you can find words, formatting, styles, and more. You can navigate from one result to the next, or you can highlight all results at once, then apply another format or replace the words by other text.

The Find & Replace dialog

To find text within the whole document, open the Find & Replace dialog without any active text selection. If you want to search only a part of your document, first select that part of text, then open the Find & Replace dialog.

To Find Text

1. Choose Edit - Find & Replace to open the Find & Replace dialog.

2. Enter the text to find in the Find text box.

3. Either click Find Next or Find All.

When you click Find Next, Writer will show you the next text that is equal to your entry. You can watch and edit the text, then click Find Next again to advance to the next found text.

If you closed the dialog, you can press a key combination (Ctrl+Shift+F) to find the next text without opening the dialog.

Alternatively, you can use the icons at the lower right of the document to navigate to the next text or to any other object in the document.

When you click Find All, Writer selects all text that is equal to your entry. Now you can for example set all found text to bold, or apply a character style to all at once.

To Replace Text

1. Choose Edit - Find & Replace to open the Find & Replace dialog.

2. Enter the text to search in the Find text box.

3. Enter the text to replace the found text in the Replace with text box.

4. Either click Replace or Replace All.

When you click Replace, Writer will search the whole document for the text in the Find box, starting at the current cursor position. When text is found, Writer highlights the text and waits for your response. Click Replace to replace the highlighted text in the document with the text in the Replace text box. Click Find Next to advance to the next found text without replacing the current selection.

When you click Replace All, Writer replaces all text that matches your entry.

To Find Styles

You want to find all text in your document to which a certain Paragraph Style is assigned, for example the "Heading 2" style.

1. Choose Edit - Find & Replace to open the Find & Replace dialog.

2. Click Other options to expand the dialog.

3. Check Paragraph Styles.
   The Find text box now is a list box, where you can select any of the Paragraph Styles that are applied in the current document.

4. Select the style to search for, then click Find Next or Find All.

To Find Formats

You want to find all text in your document to which a certain direct character formatting is assigned.

1. Choose Edit - Find & Replace to open the Find & Replace dialog.

2. Click More Options to expand the dialog.

3. Click the Format button.

5. Click Find Next or Find All.

More options

The similarity search can find text that is almost the same as your search text. You can set the number of characters that are allowed to differ.

Check the Similarity search option and optionally click the Similarities button to change the settings. (Setting all three numbers to 1 works fine for English text.)

The Navigator

The Navigator is the main tool for finding and selecting objects. You can also use the Navigator to move and arrange chapters, providing an outline view to your document.

Choose View - Navigator to open the Navigator window.

Use the Navigator for inserting objects, links and references within the same document or from other open documents. See the Navigator guide for more information.

Click the icon with the blue circle at the bottom right part of your document to open the small Navigation window.

Use the small Navigation window to quickly jump to the next object or find the next text in your document.