Find and Replace Shortcut in Google Sheets

When a typo, a renamed product, or a stale phrase shows up in dozens of cells across a sheet, fixing them one at a time is painful. Find and Replace swaps everything in one go, with controls for scope, case, and regular expressions.

The keyboard shortcut opens the dialog directly. It’s slightly different on Windows and Mac.

This is the heavier sibling of plain Find, which only locates values without replacing them.

Find and Replace Keyboard Shortcut in Google Sheets

Find and Replace Keyboard Shortcut (Windows Windows)

Ctrl + H

Find and Replace Keyboard Shortcut (Mac Mac)

⌘ + Shift + H

What this shortcut does

Pressing the shortcut opens the Find and Replace dialog. Two text fields sit at the top: the value to find and the value to replace it with.

Below those, you can change the scope (current sheet, all sheets, or a specific range), turn on case sensitivity, switch to regex, and toggle whether the search looks inside formulas too.

How to use it (step by step)

  1. Press the shortcut. The Find and Replace dialog opens in the centre of the screen.
  2. Type the value you want to find in the top field.
  3. Type the replacement in the “Replace with” field.
  4. Use “Find” to step through matches one at a time. Use “Replace” to swap the current match. Use “Replace all” to swap every match at once.
  5. Click Done when you’re finished.

A small message at the bottom tells you how many cells were changed when you hit Replace all.

Alternative method (Edit menu)

Edit menu → Find and replace. Same dialog, no keyboard combo needed. Useful when the shortcut clashes with a browser or system shortcut on your machine.

The dialog is the same one the shortcut opens, so the workflow from step 2 onward is identical.

Things to watch for

  • Replace all is reversible only by Undo. Ctrl + Z or ⌘ + Z rolls it back, but only inside the same session. A page reload loses the undo history.
  • Default scope is the current sheet. If you want to update every tab in the file, change “Search” to “All sheets” BEFORE pressing Replace all.
  • Regex unlocks pattern replacements. Turn on “Search using regular expressions” to match phone formats, dates, whitespace, or anything else with a pattern. Replacement supports capture groups ($1, $2).
  • Formula search is optional. “Also search within formulas” looks at the formula text itself, not just the result. Useful for renaming a function or a hard-coded constant across dozens of formulas.

Google Sheets keyboard shortcuts

Related Google Sheets shortcuts: