How to Globally Replace Text

Spreadsheets cannot be edited once they're added to Merit. Make any necessary changes to your spreadsheet prior to uploading it. 

When preparing your achievement, you may sometimes find yourself needing to replace some text in bulk throughout your spreadsheet before importing your document into Merit. This page includes instructions for globally replacing text in Excel. 

 

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Instructions

In this example, we have a spreadsheet of students with abbreviations in their degree column:

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For this tutorial, we will replace the abbreviated degree with the full degree the student earned. To do this, highlight the column of abbreviated text and select the Find option in the menu bar. Then choose Replace from the dropdown menu:

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Pro Tip: Use Excel's Control+H shortcut to quickly access the Find & Replace workflow.

 

You can then enter the word or phrase you would like to find and choose a replacement for it: 

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Click Replace All to change every instance of the chosen text in your highlighted column to your newly selected text:

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Be careful while selecting columns and replacing text, and always review your results. This feature will replace EVERY instance of your chosen text and may accidentally replace text that you intend to keep, including parts of words (if the letters match exactly). Because of this, it's best to globally replace text one column at a time.

 

Note: The instructions and images on this page may differ slightly depending on your operating system and version of Excel.

 

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