Find and Replace

The Novel Factory includes a ‘Find and Replace’ tool. This allows you to find all the instances of a particular word or phrase in your novel and replace them with another word or phrase. This can be particularly useful when it comes to things character names, which you might decide to change after doing a significant amount of writing.

To use the Find and Replace tool, navigate to the manuscript section and then select the magnifying glass icon from the top menu.

If you can’t see this, it’s likely to be because part of the menu is collapsed to fit on your screen. In this case, you’ll see a little grey down arrow, which you can click to show the hidden icons.

This will open a pop-up which looks like this:

In the first field, enter the word or phrase that’s currently in your novel that you would like to replace with something else.

In the second field, enter the word or phrase you would like to replace it with.

You can then tailor the find and replace using three additional options:

• Find whole words only (ticked by default)
  • If this box is ticked, the system will ignore partial matches and only replace whole words. This means that if you have asked for the word ‘one’ to be replaced with ‘two’, the system will not make changes to words like ‘someone’, ‘gone’, ‘done’ and so on. If the box is not ticked, partial matches will also be included in the find and replace – so the words ‘someone’, ‘gone’ and ‘done’ in the example above would become ‘sometwo’, ‘gtwo’ and ‘dtwo’.
• Include novel supporting data (ticked by default)
  • If this box is ticked then the find and replace will be carried out across all your data. If the box is not ticked it will be carried out on just the manuscript.
• Case sensitive (not ticked by default)
  • If this box is ticked then the find and replace will take into account any capitalisation you have entered. For example, if you have asked for the word ‘May’ to be replaced, it will only replace capitalised instances and not instances of ‘may’. If this box is not ticked the case will be ignored, so all words that match the spelling you have entered will be replaced, regardless of capitalisation.

Once you are happy with the options, click the green ‘Replace All’ button.

The pop-up will then tell you how many instances of the word or phrase have been replaced. From there, you can choose to run another find and replace or return to your manuscript.