Have you ever messed something up in a long document? Maybe you misspelled your company's name or perhaps you stuck the number "7" in when it should have been "8".

Well, most people when faced with this problem go through the entire document line by line and manually replace all the mistakes. Of course, as they are doing it they're probably thinking there has to be a better way.

They're right!

Most word processors have a feature called Find & Replace. It's normally under the Edit menu as "Find & Replace" or just "Replace".

Click the Find & Replace feature in your word processor and you'll get a screen that lets you specify the item you want to replace and a field that lets you specify what you want to replace the item with. Enter your values, hit OK (or whatever command your program uses), and all your mistakes are gone in a flash.

Of course, I need to throw in a word of caution. The Find & Replace feature isn't all that bright. It'll search for the replacement item and replace it whenever it finds it - regardless of whether it makes any sense.

What am I talking about? Let's say you used the number "7" throughout a document then decide you should have used the word "seven" instead. You go to Find & Replace and use "7" as the replace criteria and "seven" as what to replace it with.

Well, if you have a number like:

3752

Find & Replace will "fix" it so it looks like:

3seven52

So use with caution.

Some of your better Find & Replaces have a "Find Next" or "Replace Next" button that let's you go through your document and approve each replacement. Might be a better way to do it unless your 100% sure that the term you're replacing isn't going to be a problem.

One more thing. Sometimes Find & Replace will let you Find & Replace in a selection. So, you select the area you want it to work in and let it go wild. Again, not all Find & Replace features support this, so don't be disappointed if you're doesn't.