When maintaining inventory sheets, product lists, customer rosters, and monthly reports, many businesses encounter the issue of needing to uniformly replace the same keyword across multiple xlsx files. Manually opening each Excel file to find and replace is inefficient, and it is not easy to confirm which locations have been modified. This article uses the replacement of "Stationery" with "Office supplies" and "Warehouse C" with "Warehouse B" as examples to explain how to batch modify Excel content with HeSoft Doc Batch Tool and highlight the replacement results.
If you frequently work with Excel spreadsheets, you might encounter this situation: the same business data is split across many xlsx files, and each file contains the same old keywords that need to be modified. For example, the Category field in a product inventory sheet needs to be adjusted from Stationery to Office supplies, and the Location field's Warehouse C needs to be uniformly changed to Warehouse B. A single file can be handled using Excel's built-in find and replace, but when the number of files increases, repeatedly opening, replacing, and saving becomes an inefficient and error-prone task.
What's more troublesome is that batch modifications usually require follow-up review. Without clear markings, reviewers can only filter again or search for modified fields one by one, which is not very efficient. This article introduces a method more suitable for batch office file processing: using HeSoft Doc Batch Tool to perform batch find and replace on multiple Excel files and highlight the replaced content. This allows for unified content modification while making the results clearly visible in the spreadsheet at a glance.
Applicable Scenarios
Uniform keyword replacement and yellow highlighting across multiple xlsx spreadsheets is suitable for all scenarios involving "a large number of files, clear replacement rules, and the need for post-processing inspection." It applies not only to English inventory lists but also to Chinese ledgers, customer materials, statistical details, and internal management sheets.
- Product and Inventory Management: Batch adjustment of field names like category names, warehouse locations, stock statuses, and product labels.
- Enterprise Organizational Information Updates: Batch modification of historical Excel sheets during department renaming, regional division adjustments, or job title changes.
- Customer or Supplier Data Maintenance: Unified correction of customer short names, supplier names, city regions, contact identifiers, etc.
- Report Template or Historical Data Correction: Replacing old terminology with new terminology, and erroneous phrasing with standardized phrasing.
- Batch Processing Requiring Highlighted Markups: Quickly locate modification positions through color coding after processing for easy inspection and delivery.
The value of office software lies not just in opening and editing files, but more importantly, in reducing repetitive operations in batch scenarios. The positioning of HeSoft Doc Batch Tool is precisely for the batch processing of office files like documents and spreadsheets, helping users transform numerous mechanical operations into a one-time task configuration.
Effect Preview: Before and After Comparison
The pre-processing screenshot below shows a product inventory list. In the table, the Category column shows Stationery multiple times, and the Location column has some instances of Warehouse C. The red boxes mark the keyword positions that need processing this time. In actual work, this content might be scattered across different worksheets, files, or folders, making manual individual location very time-consuming.
After processing, the original Stationery has been uniformly replaced with Office supplies, and Warehouse C has been replaced with Warehouse B. More importantly, the replaced cells are highlighted in yellow. For Excel files requiring review, this yellow highlighting effect is very practical: upon opening the sheet, you can directly see which content was batch-processed without needing to search again.
Through this set of before-and-after comparisons, it's clear that this tutorial addresses not the editing of a single cell, but the batch office problem of "simultaneously replacing multiple keywords in multiple Excel files and highlighting the processing results."
Steps
Step One: Find the Excel Batch Find and Replace Feature in the Software
After launching HeSoft Doc Batch Tool , first enter "Excel Tools" from the left navigation. The main interface will list multiple functions related to Excel files, such as format conversion, image export, password protection, etc. The one you need to select here is "Find and Replace Keywords in Excel". As seen in the screenshot, the description for this function card is "Batch find and replace keywords in Excel file content," which perfectly matches the requirement of this article.
Be careful not to enter other conversion tools at this step, as our goal is not to convert Excel to PDF, JPG, or Word, but to directly modify the text content inside the Excel file. After clicking this function, the software will enter a step-by-step processing flow, making it convenient for users to complete the batch task in order.
Step Two: Import Multiple xlsx Files to be Processed
After entering the "Find and Replace Keywords in Excel" page, you first need to select the records to be processed. The top right part of the interface provides two buttons: "Add Files" and "Import Files from Folder". In the screenshot, multiple xlsx files related to Product Inventory List have already been imported, and the file list displays information like name, path, extension, creation time, and modification time.
If your files are scattered in different locations, you can use "Add Files" to select them individually; if the files are concentrated in one folder, using "Import Files from Folder" is recommended, as this better fits the batch processing mindset. After importing, you should first check if all the files in the list belong to this task to avoid processing spreadsheets that shouldn't be modified. For multi-file batch replacement, file confirmation is very important because the subsequent settings, once executed, will take effect uniformly on all files in the list.
If you find mistakenly added files in the list, you can remove them via the delete icon in the action column. If you need to reorganize the files, you can also use the clear function in the interface. Once everything is confirmed correct, click "Next" at the bottom of the page to enter the keyword processing rule settings.
Step Three: Select Exact Text Search to Reduce Risk of Incorrect Replacement
On the keyword options page, you first need to set the search method. The screenshot shows "Exact text search" selected, next to "Use formula pattern for fuzzy text search". For tasks requiring one-to-one replacement of specified terms, exact text search makes it easier to control the outcome. For instance, find Stationery and replace it with Office supplies, and find Warehouse C and replace it with Warehouse B.
The screenshot also shows two checked additional options: "Ignore case of letters" and "Match the whole word rather than part of the word". This is particularly helpful for English spreadsheets. Ignoring case can accommodate different writings like Stationery, stationery, etc.; matching whole words can avoid mistakenly replacing fragments contained in longer words. For Chinese keywords, it's also advisable to decide whether stricter matching is needed based on the actual situation, especially when keywords are short, paying extra attention to mis-replacement risks.
Step Four: Fill in the Find List and Replace List
There are two key areas in the middle of the page: the "Keywords to find" list on the left, and the "Keywords to replace with" list on the right. The two sides correspond line by line. The settings in the screenshot can be understood as two replacement rules: First, replace Stationery with Office supplies; second, replace Warehouse C with Warehouse B.
When filling out, it's recommended to check as follows: First, confirm the search keywords on the left are exactly the same as in the original spreadsheet; then, confirm the replacement content on the right is the final new text to be written into the sheet. For English content, pay special attention to spaces, hyphens, case, and plural forms; for Chinese content, note full-width/half-width symbols, parentheses, abbreviations, and aliases. Batch processing is highly efficient, but the premise is accurate rules. If a rule is filled in incorrectly, the error will also be amplified in batch.
The hint on the right side of the interface says "Leaving it blank means deleting," which means if the replacement keyword is empty, the software might delete the found content. Therefore, in a replacement scenario like this tutorial, every row on the right should have clear new content filled in; do not leave any rows blank by mistake.
Step Five: Enable Highlighting for Replacement Results
In the "Other Settings" area, you can see the "Highlight replaced content" toggle switch. When enabled, the software will mark the replaced content with highlights while performing the replacement. In the processed example, the cells containing Office supplies and Warehouse B are displayed in yellow, which is exactly the effect after enabling this option.
Why is it recommended to enable highlighting during batch replacement? Because after batch processing multiple Excel files, users usually need to know where changes have been made. Highlighting serves as a visual marker for the modified positions, facilitating self-checks, colleague reviews, or supervisor confirmations. Especially in files with substantial data like inventory sheets, financial ledgers, and contract lists, yellow highlighting can significantly reduce review costs.
Step Six: Proceed to the Next Step, Set the Output Location, and Execute Batching
After confirming the keywords and highlighting options, click "Next". From the interface flow bar, you can see that subsequent steps include "Set Save Location" and "Start Processing". Although the screenshot doesn't fully show the save location page, based on the flow, it can be inferred that the software will let the user choose the save location for the processed files. It's recommended to save the results to a new folder, such as "Replaced Files" or "Processed Version", to keep them separate from the original files, making rollback and comparison easier.
Finally, enter the start processing phase and execute the batch task. After completion, open the output xlsx files to check the results: the target keywords should have been replaced with the new content, and the replaced cells should display highlighting. If there are many processed files, you can spot-check a few to confirm the replacement rules and highlighting effect meet expectations before archiving or distributing them.
FAQ and Notes
1. Should I back up the original files before batch replacement?
Backup is recommended. A single batch operation can affect multiple files, and if keyword rules are filled in incorrectly, recovery can be troublesome. The safest approach is to keep the original files and output the processing results to a new directory.
2. Why is there no highlighting after replacement?
Check if the "Highlight replaced content" toggle switch is enabled. If not enabled, the software might only perform text replacement without marking the cells. Also, make sure you are opening the processed output file, not the original file.
3. Do spaces within keywords affect the search?
Yes. The example Warehouse C contains a space. If there are extra spaces, missing spaces, or different symbols in the original file, the exact search might not find a match. To reduce input errors, you can copy the text directly from the original spreadsheet as the search keyword before processing.
4. How to maintain alignment for multiple replacement rules?
The left find list and the right replace list correspond line by line. Line 1 corresponds to line 1, line 2 to line 2. When filling in multiple rules, check them line by line to avoid order misalignment.
5. Can this be used for Chinese Excel spreadsheets?
The same approach can be used to process Chinese text. For example, replacing "文具" with "办公用品", or "华南仓" with "华东仓". The specific supported file formats and processing scope should be based on the actual software interface; the screenshot example shows xlsx files.
Summary
Facing the need for unified keyword replacement across multiple xlsx spreadsheets, manual operation is not only inefficient but also prone to missed changes. Using HeSoft Doc Batch Tool , you can add multiple Excel files to the same task, set search keywords and replacement keywords, and enable post-replacement highlighting. This way, after processing, the file content is uniformly updated, and the modification locations can be quickly identified by color.
If your work frequently involves maintaining Excel files like product lists, inventory sheets, customer lists, report ledgers, etc., consider delegating such repetitive find-and-replace tasks to a batch processing tool. Test the rules with a small number of files first, and once confirmed correct, batch process all files. This can significantly save office time while ensuring accuracy.