How to use AutoCAD’s ‘FIND’ and ‘REPLACE’ command to correct text strings.

So – The situation is like this. You spent all day copying and pasting notes all over your drawing stating that the timber species can only be Cherry – and nothing else… Of course you get your drawings back from the Designer and they want to change it to Maple…Grrr

So you’re now faced with scouring your drawing to find all references to ‘Cherry’ and replacing them with ‘Maple’ –  not only time consuming, but what if you miss a note?

Wait a minute, there’s got to be an easier way – right?

Of course there is – AutoCAD comes with a ‘Find and replace’ text tool, just like Word.

You can find it under:

Annotate tab > Text Panel

or

Edit Menu > Find

or type

‘FIND’ at the command prompt

The find and Replace Dialogue allows you to search your drawing for any text string, and replace it with another.

You can choose just part of the drawing or the whole file and you can chose whether to search inside Blocks and Xrefs. Click on the expansion arrow to see all the options.

By checking the ‘List Results’ box and hitting ‘Find’ you can see all the results listed.

Tip: Click on the ‘Zoom to highlighted result’ button, or double click on the highlighted text to be taken right to the result.

You can now have a look at the note in context before you hit ‘Replace’ – or you can just go Gung-Ho and hit ‘Replace all’ to do the lot.

Looking for more AutoCAD text tips? Check out how to strip unwanted formatting from Mtext.