iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Find & Replace

Even after you’ve sorted, filtered, and categorized your spreadsheet into a set of perfectly groomed and organized tables, it’s not always easy to put your hands on the exact piece of data you’re looking for. As you plump your data into a giant haystack, the individual needles get harder and harder to find. Happily, Numbers’ search features make quick work of hunting down wayward data, and its Find & Replace utility lets you change these results to transform found words and phrases into something else. When you need to change the name of the sidekick academy’s “Gamma Rays for Health and Fitness” course to “Risks of Reckless Irradiation,” Find & Replace updates all references in the class roster faster than you can say, “glowing green sidekicks.”

Finding Data from the Search Pane

To launch your search, choose Edit → Find → Show Search, or press ⌘-F. Numbers pops open the Search pane, the starting point for all your spreadsheet’s search expeditions, located just below the sheet canvas at the bottom of the document window. When you first open the Search pane, Numbers automatically puts your cursor in the Search field. Type the word or phrase you want to find and, as you type, the Search pane lists your results, as shown in Figure 19-14. To hide the search pane, press ⌘-F again, or choose Edit → Find → Hide Search. You can also slide the pane closed by dragging its resize handle down at the top right corner of the Search pane.

To jump to a specific search result, click its ...