Searching and replacing values

- [Instructor] No text editing environment would be complete without an easy way to search through the text and make replacements. Access is no exception, and we can use the same find and replace tools that you may be familiar with from other Office programs. Let's go ahead and open up the guest table in Data Sheet View, and I want to locate specific records quickly and easily using the search box at the very bottom of the screen. I'm gonna type in Dixon, and it's gonna go through and find all the instances of the word Dixon in the database. If I want to find others, just press the enter button and it'll skim through the database and find every occurrence.

An alternate option is to go up to the ribbon and press the find icon, the one with the big magnifying glass or use the Control+F shortcut. Once again, we have the Find tab here, and we can type in the text that we want to search for inside of our data table. We have some additional options going this route. We can choose to look in the current document or the current field, we can match any part of the field, the whole field, or just the start of the field, and we can search all, up, or down from our current position in the data table. We also have the options to match cases or search fields as formatted.

We have another tab here called Replace, and we can go through and replace text inside of our data table. This makes it easy to change lots of data all at once. Now, I've noticed in our Country field that I'd like to update the text United States to United States of America. I could use the Replace section to do just that. We're gonna go ahead and find United States and come down to the Replace With section and type in United States of America. We're gonna do this throughout the entire data table, so I'll leave look in the current document, match any part of the field, and we're gonna search everything.

I can press Find Next to find the first occurrence from my current position and press the Replace button to adjust it, or I can just press Replace All to go through the entire data table. Notice that I won't be able to undo this operation. Once you're ready to go, just press the Yes button. Now I can go ahead and close the Find and Replace window and take a look at our countries here. And we can see that every occurrence of United States has been replaced with United States of America. So the Find and Replace tools make it a snap to locate specific records as well as edit out common inconsistencies in the data.