Spell Check and Editing with Search and Replace

Excel's Spell Check feature is a real godsend if you are like me and are not the best (that is, most accurate) typist in the world. Spell checking a worksheet can go a long way towards eliminating typos that get by the program's AutoCorrect feature. The only problem with using Spell Check is that many spreadsheets are crammed full of acronyms, technical terms, and formal names that Excel's spelling dictionary has never heard of. To prevent the spell checker from really slowing you down by stopping at every other word in the spreadsheet to ask if it is misspelled, you need to build custom dictionaries that contain most of these erstwhile unknown terms.

You can use the Find and Replace feature to quickly locate every occurrence of a specific string (a series of characters) in a worksheet and then have Excel actually update the cells that it finds with new text or numbers. This feature is a real timesaver when you need to make a global change that affects cells in diverse parts of the spreadsheet.