Forum Discussion
Search and Replace Destroys All Formatting?!
Elizur In-cell formatting has always been fragile and cumbersome if you ask me. I hardly ever use it. That being said, Excel is not a word processor, it is a calculation engine.
What would you do when the searched string has mixed formatting, like 'these words' in this string:
"I was looking for these words"
Jan, I acknowledge that Excel is numbers-oriented and I do not expect Excel to be as word processing functional as, say, Word. But OTOH, I certainly do expect Excel -- an extremely widespread, longstanding product by a major software company, which has gone through umpteen revisions -- to have ironed out major bugs in the limited word processing functions it does offer. [i.e., "first, do no harm.] Since Excel offers "search and replace" of selected text, that function should work without damaging other text. Who would think that searching and replacing one word would wipe out all formatting everywhere in all text in all cells containing that word, including text that was not to be searched and replaced? And I can't believe that I, a non-technical person who has used Excel lightly for decades, would be the one to discover that it does. Surely, Excel engineers have long known about that rather fundamental search and replace bug, but not fixed it.
As to your question, my version of Excel (Microsoft 365 subscription) does not allow me to indicate the formatting of a searched term, so I couldn't search and replace by font. It entirely disregards the lack or presence of formatting when it searches and replaces. So, had I wanted to change the formatting in a word anywhere or everywhere, I believe I would have had to search for each occurrence of that word and change it manually where desired. But again, my problem is that I searched and replaced one word and it replaces all types of formatting throughout the entire cell -- not "just" in the searched and replaced term.
