6. Find & Replace

This powerful function allows you to search for a particular term, and if necessary, replace it with another.

Selecting Multi-Bin Find & Replace from the Search menu item, or by clicking the relevant icon, located at the left-hand side of the main Altera window, will bring up the Find/Replace dialogue.

The dialogue is laid out as such:


  • Find
 Enter the word or string here to search for.
  • Replace
 If you wish to replace the word or string above, enter the new word or string here. Altera will search for word A and replace it with word B.
  • Data
 Select this if you wish to search the Data.
  • Headers
 Select this if you wish to search the Headers.
  • Case Sensitive
 Check this box if you want the search to be case-sensitive.
  • Entire Word
 Check this box if you wish to search for the string as an entire word. The software will not return any partial matches in this case.
  • Exclude Matches
 If you want to exclude a word or string in the results, check this box.

  • RegEx
If you wish to search using a Regular Expression, check this option. Learn more about RegEx at the back of the manual.
  • Search In
 You can select which Bins you wish to search in by selecting the relevant Bin type. If you click on the arrow (>) next to a folder, it will be expanded.Check the boxes next to the Folders or Bins you wish to include in the search.
  • Columns
 In the Columns Layout dropdown, you can select whether to search with the default entries, or to search with specific ones.Select “Default” and all options will be available to you. You can click options from the “Unselected” pane, and they will appear in the “Selected” pane.

If you wish to use all Columns to search, click the “Move All” button, and all entries will be moved to the “Selected” pane.

When you have entered your search words or strings, click the “Search” button in the lower right corner of the Find/Replace screen, and your search will start.

The search will return any results that match your selection. If you have searched multiple Bins, each Bin searched will generate results in a separate tab. As you can see in the screenshot below, a search was carried out using 2 Bins, and the results returned reflect that. Each tab is named after the Bin searched.

If you wish to replace any of the data with new values, use the replace tool. In the main Find/Replace pane, there is a text box labelled Replace. You can enter new data into this box.
You can see that there is a button labelled Replace at the bottom of the results pane, with a downward pointing arrow to the right of the button. After you have entered the replacement text into the Replace box, use the downward pointing arrow to select either Replace in this Bin or Replace All.


Replace in this Bin

This will replace all the matching entries with your new data, in the current Bin.
Replace All

This will replace all matching entries with your new data in all selected Bins.

The 4 direction arrows at the bottom right of the results screen allow you to move around the results data.