MAPILab Find and Replace for Excel is a COM add-on that enhances the built-in find and replace capabilities of MS Excel. This fine piece of software not only replicates Excel’s existing searching functionality, but also offers you the possibility of using “regular expressions” to perform selective replacements in extremely complex character strings and formulas. Its wizard-like interface (which you can open directly from Excel) makes the whole process clear and easy-to-use.
This powerful tool shows its full potential when dealing with large spreadsheets full of all kinds of complex data (URLs, mathematical formulas, and so on). So if the search and replace tasks you usually perform deal with simple words, basic character strings, simple numeric values, etc., the functionality already built in MS Excel and a wise use of wildcards should be enough. However, those needing to search for a specific character string which occurs differently in hundreds of complex and long fields, and which need to be replaced by something else but only when certain conditions are met, they do need a tool like this.
MAPILab Find and Replace for Excel allows you to use regular expressions – a set of templates that you can build by using dozens of different parameters and descriptive elements. These regular expressions need to be built using the “language”, the glossary, developed for this specific tool, but once you master the basics of it, you will be able to perform extremely accurate and selective searches and replacements. One of the things that make this tool so powerful is the fact that it can use the content found in a search to create the new content to be used to replace it, which will allow you to, for instance, reverse the order of the characters or digits found in a certain string, at a certain position, and after a specific character or text. The possibilities are endless.
To make things a bit easier for you, when the tool installs it adds a specific button in your MS Excel interface, allowing you to activate from there a wizard-like interface that will guide you through the three steps needed to find and replace the desired elements. To preserve the original content of your Excel books, the program will create a back-up copy every time a spreadsheet is selected. Besides, the changes performed are perfectly reversible, and will not be made permanent until you save the original Excel book.
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