Autocad Tips and Tutorials #1: Find and Replace Dialog Box

I'll show you how to use the Find and Replace Dialog Box of Autocad.  It's actually easy and it's just like the Find and Replace tools from some of the popular word processors that we are using.

Here's an example. On the first image that you see, there's a drawing of a house in Autocad filled with callouts and descriptions of the finishes to be used.

Suppose that you changed your mind suddenly and decided that you don't want to use fiber cement anymore for some of the substrates of the house but use gypsum board instead.  If there's a lot of occurrences of the words fiber cement scattered all over your drawing, it'll take some of your precious time just to find all of them and replacing them by the word gypsum board one by one.

Here's an image showing some of the callouts in the drawing above.  We'll use the Find and Replace Dialog Box of Autocad to replace all the occurrences of the words fiber cement with gypsum board.  Access the tool from the menu bar in Edit > Find... or you can type the word Find on the Command Line below.  Both means will activate the Find and Replace Dialog Box of Autocad.

On the "Find what:" entry, type in "fiber cement".  And on the "Replace with:" entry, type in "gypsum board".  You can then press the Find button below and the Find Next consecutively afterwards if you would want Autocad to show you the words one by one and then decide if you would want that word in the specific location to be replaced by pressing the Replace button.  You can however automatically replace all occurrences of the word by just pressing the Replace All button anytime if you're sure that you want all of it replaced.

Here's the result of replacing all the occurrences of the words "fiber cement".  Notice that we failed to include the word "BOARD" on the "Find what:" entry that is why there are two of it next to each other.  Notice also that the words "gypsum board" are all in lowercase because that is what we wrote down on the "Replace with:" entry.  You should know that all the words that you typed in for the "Find what:" entry are non case sensitive, so you can type in either uppercase or lowercase letters and Autocad would still find the word.  On the other hand, the words that you typed in for the "Replace with:" entry are shown in the drawings as how you typed it in so if you typed in with all small caps, it will be shown in the drawings in all small caps. 

The Find and Replace Dialog Box also works with replacing words inside a block or replacing the value of an attribute inside a block.

I know some of you never knew, like I was before, that the Find and Replace Dialog Box existed in Autocad just like some of the popular word processors you're using so I hope that this tip may become useful for you while working with your drawings in the future.