Find and Replace Text In PowerPoint


When you work with large presentations, being able to locate text quickly, either to edit the text or to verify its accuracy, is vital. You don’t want to step through a presentation slide by slide until you find text you want to see.

As with all the Office programs, PowerPoint offers a powerful find-and-replace command that enables you to locate text you want to find. After PowerPoint locates the text, you can request that PowerPoint automatically replace it. If, for example, you realize that your company’s vice-president’s name is spelled McGuire instead of MacGuire, you can quickly make PowerPoint change all the misspelled instances of the name, even if you’re about to start your presentation in the next minute.

Find the Text
Click the Find button to display the Find dialog box.

Enter the Search Text
Type the data you want to find in the Find What text box. If you’ve searched for the same data before, you can click the down arrow to open the Find What drop-down list box and select the data to search for it again.

Start the Search
Click the Find Next button. PowerPoint searches from the current position in the presentation to the end of the presentation. If PowerPoint finds the text anywhere in the presentation, it displays the first slide that holds that text.

Replace the Text
If you want PowerPoint to replace found text with new text, click the Home ribbon’s Replace button to display the Replace dialog box. Type the text to locate and the text to replace that located text within the Find What and Replace With fields.

Replace All Occurrences
If you click the Replace All button, PowerPoint replaces all the matches with your replacement text throughout the slide. Such a change is more global and possibly riskier because you may replace text you didn’t really want replaced. By clicking Find Next before you click the Replace button, you’ll be sure that the proper text is being replaced, but such a single occurrence find and replacement operation takes a lot of time in a long presentation.