Using Project Replace

Did your editor decide she hates the name Bob? Did your manuscript setting move from Key West to Paris? If the idea of changing hundreds of instances of a word makes you cringe, relax. Making the change is painless with Project Replace.

Project Replace provides a global way to find and replace all instances of a word or words (except words where they appear in keywords, covered in Chapter 5, and Label and Status values, described in Chapter 4).

Follow these steps to use Project Replace:

1. Choose Edit⇒Find⇒Project Replace.

The Project Replace window appears, as shown in Figure 17-4. Many of the options available in Project Search also appear here. (See the section “Working with Project Search,” earlier in this chapter, for information on that search.)

Changes made via Project Replace can’t be undone. Consider creating a backup of the project before making substantial changes. Backups are covered in Chapter 21.

2. In the Replace text box, type the word that you want to replace.

If your editor hates the name Bob and wants you to change it to Abishek, you would type Bob here.

3. In the With text box, type the new word.

Continuing with the example from Step 2, you would type Abishek here.

4. If you don’t care about the letter case, select Ignore Case.

In the example with the names, you’d want to uncheck Ignore Case to make sure that you don’t change continued to bob in the water to continued to Abishek in the water.

5. Select Whole Words Only to avoid changing words that contain the Replace word within them.

For example, you wouldn’t want to change bobbed to Abishekbed.

6. In the Scope section, choose the elements of a document on which you want to perform the replace.

Deselect any item to which you don’t want to apply the change.

7. Click Replace.

As shown in Figure 17-5, the progress bar at the bottom of the window shows the progress of the operation and displays a final count of how many documents were changed.

8. Click Close to close the window.

If you want to reverse the Project Replace you just ran, click the Swap button in the Project Replace window, and then click the Replace button.

Does Project Replace make you nervous? Consider using Project Search (refer to the section “Searching a project,” earlier in this chapter) in conjunction with Document Replace (covered in the “Working with Document Replace” section, later in this chapter) to step through each match before replacing it.