Find and Replace, Go To and Go To Special in Grid

Once a workbook grows past a screen or two, finding things becomes a job in itself. Where did that customer's name end up? Which cells still mention last year's rate? Grid by Zaweba has Find and Replace for searching by content, and Go To and Go To Special for jumping to places and kinds of cell.

Finding

Ctrl+F opens Find. Type what you're looking for and Grid moves from match to match. You choose whether to search the current sheet or the whole workbook, and whether to look in formulas, in values or in notes. That choice matters more than it first appears.

Searching in formulas finds text as it's written in the cell, so a search for "Sheet2" finds every formula that refers to that sheet, and a search for "VLOOKUP" finds every old-style lookup you might want to modernise. Searching in values finds what the cells show, which is right when you're looking for a figure produced by a formula. Searching in notes finds the comments people have left on cells, often the quickest way to find "the one with the query about it".

Find All lists every match at once instead of one at a time. Scanning the list tells you how many there are and where they are, and you can pick one to jump straight to it.

Replacing

Ctrl+H opens Replace. Give the text to find and what to put instead, then replace matches one at a time or all together. It's ideal for renaming a product throughout a price list, correcting a misspelt name, or swapping a reference inside many formulas when a sheet is renamed by hand.

Replace All is powerful, so check the scope before pressing it. Searching the whole workbook can change cells on sheets you aren't looking at. Running Find All first shows exactly which cells will be affected, and if something goes wrong, Undo reverses the whole replacement.

Go To

Ctrl+G or F5 opens Go To. Type a cell address or a defined name and Grid jumps there and selects it. In a large sheet that's faster than scrolling, and with names it doubles as a way to navigate: name the start of each section and Go To becomes a contents page.

Go To Special

Go To Special selects cells by type rather than by address. Choose a kind of cell, such as blanks, formulas or constants, and Grid selects every matching cell at once. What you do next is up to you.

Some useful combinations: select the blanks in a column and type a value to fill them all; select the formulas and give them a light fill so they're easy to tell from typed inputs; select the constants in a template and clear them to reset it for next month, leaving every formula in place.

Getting into the habit

Use Find All before any big replacement. Use the formulas option to audit a workbook for references to old sheets or functions. Use Go To Special with blanks after importing a list, since empty cells in key columns are a common cause of lookups and sorts going astray. Together with tracing precedents and dependents, these searches give you a good map of any workbook in Grid by Zaweba, including ones you didn't build.