Make Office Better

Improve your ‘Find & Replace’ searches

Libreoffice Writer has a basic ‘Find & Replace’ tool that lets you search your documents for specific text and replace it with something else. If you want more control over your searches, install the ‘Alternative Find & Replace for Writer’ extension. It adds some brilliant features, including the ability to calculate how many times you’ve used a particular word or phrase.

To install it, go to www.snipca. com/29282, scroll down, click the ‘Altsearch.oxt’ link above All Releases, and save the file to your desktop.

Open Libreoffice, click Tools at the top, Extension Manager, Add, navigate to your desktop, select the file you downloaded, click Open, close the Extension Manager window, then click Restart Now to restart Libreoffice with the extension added.

Now open any document in Libreoffice Writer. You’ll notice the extension’s green binoculars icon at the top left of your toolbar (see screenshot). Click this to open the Alternative Find & Replace box. As with Writer’s default Find & Replace tool, you can type a search word in the upper box and a replacement word in the lower box.

However, the three dropdown menus (Regular, Extended and Properties) let you refine your search criteria. For example, you’ll see options to search for your word within manual line breaks, tables, hyperlinks or text that has been formatted in a specific way (bold, italics, and so on). Click the Count button if you want to see the number of times that word appears in your document. LIBREOFFICE WRITER