Google Docs Find and Replace!

Google today announced that ‘Find and Replace’ has been implemented within Google Docs. Vivian Leung posted the update to the Google Docs blog. Which as the first commenter pointed out, “just highlights that you actually couldn’t do this before”.

It’s really the way the post is pitched that’s most perplexing. It’s written as if an age old problem has finally been solved, as if there was never anyway to do it before, as if they invented the concept. It’s wrapped up in a story of how Canadians use the letter ‘u’ in some words such as favourite and colour (forgetting to mention us Brits). Leung begins,

“I’m Canadian. And although I’ve lived and worked here in the U.S. quite some time now, the Canadian spellings of certain words still often slip into my documents. Favourite, colour, neighbour, centre, etc. — you get the idea. This week, we’ve added a new find and replace toolbar (for documents) which will make it easier for me to catch those Canadian spellings when I’m writing for an American audience.”’

She then goes on to explain the process,

“Then type the text you want to find, and click Find Next (or press Ctrl+G). If it appears more than once in your document, you can click Find Next again to select the next occurrence.

If you want to change some or all of the occurrences in your document, just type the replacement text in the second box. Click the Replace button to change a selected occurrence to the replacement text, or click Replace All to change all the occurrences in your document in one shot.”

Now it’s not the fact that this feature has been around for roughly 15+ years, available in early versions of Windows Notepad, it’s the final sentence that’ll leave you mystified,

“Pretty useful tool, eh?”