Now You're Cooking! Tip

August 2007

Using NYC’s Global Find and Replace

NYC users will find that it is advantageous to maintain consistent wording throughout their recipes.

NYC lets you replace text strings with your preferred strings across cookbook(s) in a single operation. Find and Replace operations apply to text in recipe ingredients (units and description) and in the recipe directions area.

To Find and Replace text strings:

1. Select Tools... Data Management... Cookbooks tab...

2. If you want the Find and Replace to work across all (or selected cookbooks), click "across cookbooks". To Find and Replace within the open cookbook only, click "current cookbook".

3. Press the Find and Replace button.

If you selected "across cookbooks" you will get a dialog box that lists which cookbooks to operate on. The default is to Find and Replace across all cookbooks in your user folder, but you can add or remove cookbooks from this list using the Add and Remove button. Whatever cookbooks are in the list when you press the Find and Replace button at the bottom of the window will be the cookbooks that will be used for the Find and Replace operation.

NOTE: NYC's Find and Replace operation AUTOMATICALLY matches whole words only - it will NOT replace a word or phrase that is embedded into another word. This is to avoid situations that you don't want. For example, if your text and replacement are "med","medium", without the match whole word functionality, "medium" would get changed to "mediumium" and "medical" would get changed to "mediumical". Special characters like spaces, hyphens, periods, commas, etc act as word delimiters that tell NYC where each word begins and ends. NYC also recognizes whole word only matches at the beginning or end of a text string.

Customizing the Find and Replace Feature

You can customize the Find and Replace feature to make modifications you want. To customize Find and Replace:

1. Select Tools... Data Management... Cookbooks tab... Customize Find and Replace frame... Text to Replace... button.

2. The left listbox includes text strings used to replace text strings in the right text box. Click on any item in the left list to display in the right list all the text strings that it replaces.

3. Add or alter text strings using the Add and Replace buttons to control how NYC globally replaces text.

You can also get the same window just before you do a Find and Replace operation across cookbooks:

1. Select Tools... Data Management... Cookbooks...

2. Click on "across cookbooks".

3. Press the Find and Replace... button.

4. Press the Text to Replace... button.

5. Add or modify text you want to use in the left list. Add or modify replacement text in the right list.

6. Press the Save button.

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