Find and Replace in Headers

One of the very useful tools provided in Excel is Find and Replace, which allows you to locate and change information stored in cells. One place that Find and Replace won't work, however, is with information stored in headers or footers for your worksheets.

The only way to handle the finding and replacing of information in a header or footer is to use a macro. It is a rather trivial task to access what is stored in the various parts of the header and footer, check them for what you want to find, and then replace it with some new text. The following macro provides an example.

Sub FnR_HF()	
    Dim sWhat As String, sReplacment As String
    Const csTITLE As String = "Find and Replace"

    sWhat = InputBox("Replace what", csTITLE)
    If Len(sWhat) = 0 Then Exit Sub
    sReplacment = InputBox("With what", csTITLE)

    With ActiveSheet.PageSetup
        ' Substitute Header/Footer values
        .LeftHeader = Application.WorksheetFunction.Substitute( _
                      .LeftHeader, sWhat, sReplacment)
        .CenterHeader = Application.WorksheetFunction.Substitute( _
                        .CenterHeader, sWhat, sReplacment)
        .RightHeader = Application.WorksheetFunction.Substitute( _
                       .RightHeader, sWhat, sReplacment)
        .LeftFooter = Application.WorksheetFunction.Substitute( _
                      .LeftFooter, sWhat, sReplacment)
        .CenterFooter = Application.WorksheetFunction.Substitute( _
                        .CenterFooter, sWhat, sReplacment)
        .RightFooter = Application.WorksheetFunction.Substitute( _
                       .RightFooter, sWhat, sReplacment)
    End With
End Sub

Note how the macro does the replacements in all three parts of the header and all three parts o the footer.

If you prefer to not use your own macro, or if you want a more full-featured Find and Replace for Excel, you might consider the free FlexFind add-in from Excel MVP Jan Karel Pieterse:

http://www.jkp-ads.com/officemarketplaceff-en.asp

This add in searches regularly, but also searched in lots of other areas including headers and footers.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3928) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Find and Replace in Headers.