Find and Replace

When you're working with large documents, it can be hard and time consuming to locate a specific word or phrase. With Writer's Find and Replace feature you can quickly search for text inside a document and to quickly replace it with a replacement text.

Writer has two ways to find text within a document: the Find toolbar for fast searching and the Find & Replace dialog which has the replace feature.

Find toolbar

Open the Find toolbar

You can display the Find toolbar by by pressing Ctrl+F key combination or choosing Edit > Find from the Menu bar.

Using the Find tool

To look for a word or phrase, click in the box and type your text, then press Enter to find the next occurrence of that term from the current cursor position.

Click the Find Next or Find Previous buttons as needed.

Click the Find All button to select all instances of the search term within the document.

Select Match Case to find only the instances that exactly match the search term.

Find & Replace

Opening the Find & Replace tool

To display the Find & Replace dialog, click on the icon, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+H. When the dialog is open, optionally click Other Options to expand it.

Using the Find & Replace dialog:

1. Type the text you want to find in the Find box.
2. To replace the text with another text, type the new text in the Replace box.
3. You can select various options such as matching the case, matching whole words only, or doing a search for similar words.
4. When you have set up your search, click Find Next. To replace the found text, click Replace.

Tip

If you click Find All, LibreOffice selects all instances of the search text in the document. Similarly, if you click Replace All, LibreOffice replaces all matches, without stopping for you to accept each instance.