UPCOMING WEBINAR: From Thousands of Tables To One Clear Story: using AI in survey analysis Displayr's Find and Replace capabilities are quite robust and enable you to search and edit your document in bulk. This article discusses how to use Wildcards to edit select labels in your document in bulk.
You can also right-click and Paste Labels that you've copied from other sets or Excel. See How to Copy and Paste Variable Labels for more information.
To access this feature, you can hit Ctrl+F or click Find & Replace in the toolbar.
A panel will appear with tabs for Find and Replace. Results that match your search term will be listed in the Results section, and they will also be highlighted in yellow where they appear in your document. You can click on entries under Results to jump to the position of the variable, text, table, or other item that has been identified.
The Replace tab allows you to replace the search term with a new term in the result that you have selected currently, or in the entire document.
Method - Choosing what you want to search/edit
Method - Allowing for advanced find/replace
Method - Using wildcards to edit labels in bulk
Requirements
Familiarity with Wildcards. Wildcards allow you to create rules whereby you find and replace text even where there are no exact matches.
| * | Matches anything. e.g. "Ages * and up" would match "Ages seven and up". |
| # | Matches a single numeral (or the character #). e.g. "Q#" would match "Q7". |
| ? | Matches a single character. e.g. "Part ?" would match "Part A". |
You can use the special text ${0} in Replace with to quote the original text that was found in the search. For example, to append "POST" to the end of a set of variable labels:
Find what: *
Replace with: ${0}POST
Note that wildcards do not apply when doing replacements on JavaScript formulas that have more than one line of code.
Method - Choosing what you want to search/edit
The Find in section allows you to narrow down the items in the document you search through. This includes specific options of Items on pages, Variables, Raw Data. For example, you can choose Variables > Variable labels to only search through variable labels in your document. You can also select specific items in the document and check Only search selected items. This is most useful when you are using Replace to edit variable labels in bulk.
Method - Allowing for advanced find/replace
The Advanced section has settings for how to work with the Find and Replace verbatims. Match will only match the pattern at a specific part of the label. For example, if you use Match > Start for Coke, you will only match part of the variables in the selection:
Here you can also check Use wildcards to enable that functionality.
Method - Using wildcards to edit labels in bulk
Be sure Advanced > Use wildcards is checked for this functionality. Say you have the following variables:
They weren't labeled with a question, and you need to add it to the beginning of the labels for the label tidying to work. You can Find > * and Replace > Q5: ${0} to get:
Now, say for the variables above, you only want to append a label (red) to the end of the Coke variables. You can Find > *Coke* and Replace > ${0} (red) to only rename those variables: