Pocket Tools › Find & Replace with Preview

What it is

A sidebar for Google Docs that adds the two things the built-in find and replace does not have: a list of what it is about to change, and search by formatting. The contents of your document never leave Google, and there is no Pocket Tools server. The only request that goes outside is the paid license check, described below.

Opening it

Extensions → Find & Replace with Preview → Open Find & Replace. The panel opens on the right and stays with the document you are in.

The loop

1. Say what you are looking for — text, formatting, or both.
2. Press Find. Nothing in your document changes. You get a count and a list, each row showing the match with the words around it.
3. Go there — click a row and the document jumps to that match and selects it, including the ones in the header and footer that are otherwise a hunt to find. Searching inside a selection is the exception: rows do not jump there, because moving the cursor would clear the selection the list was built from.
4. Replace — everything at once, or one row at a time.

If you change the search conditions, the selection, or the document after pressing Find, the list is marked out of date and replacing is blocked until you search again. The list and the replacement can never disagree.

Finding by text

Type what you are looking for and press Enter to search. A search cannot contain a line break — Google Docs keeps each paragraph on its own, so the break between two lines is not part of the text. The add-on says so rather than quietly returning nothing.

• Match case — Draft stops matching draft.
• Regular expression — for patterns rather than literal text. See the support page for the two limits Google's engine has.
• Ignore whitespace — treats runs of spaces as one, so text copied out of a PDF still matches.
• Special characters — a menu for the ones that are hard to type: tab, full-width space, non-breaking space, curly quotes, two-or-more spaces. Picking one inserts the pattern that actually matches it and turns the regular expression option on for you.

Finding by formatting

This is the part Google's own find does not have. Switch to Formatting or Both and you can search for how text looks.

• B / I / U / S / x² / x₂ cycle through three states. Click once for only this, twice for not this, a third time to ignore it. The summary line above them always says what the current condition is, in words. A condition applies to the whole match: a word that is only half bold is not a match for bold.
• Font, size, color, highlight — each has its own tick box, so a value can sit in the box without being part of the search. Unticked boxes are grayed out, so you can see at a glance what is actually a condition.
• Pick up formatting from the selection — select some text in the document and press the button; the conditions fill themselves in and the summary line says what was picked up. It only picks up what is set on the text: a font or size that the paragraph style supplies is left alone, because searching for it would match nothing. If the selection has mixed formatting it says which part differs, instead of guessing.

Both puts the text and the formatting controls on screen together. Set both and a match has to satisfy both — "every bold occurrence of Figure, but not the plain ones". Leave the formatting conditions on Any and it searches by text alone, which is how you change formatting on a word wherever it appears: find Bluebird, replace it with Skylark in bold blue, and every one of them is caught whatever it looked like before. The replacement formatting only appears in Both and Formatting, so this is the mode to be in when the replacement needs to look different.

Replacing

• Text — leave the replacement empty to delete the matches instead.
• Formatting — bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, font, size, color and highlight. You can change formatting without changing the text: leave the replacement text empty and set formatting only.
• Existing formatting survives. Replacing a word inside a bold blue heading leaves the new word bold and blue. Only what you asked to change, changes.
• Replace all does the whole list. Replace on a single row does just that one, then rebuilds the list, because the positions after it have moved.

A replace is one undo step — Ctrl+Z once in the document puts everything back, text and formatting alike. That is measured, not assumed: 768 matches replaced across a 2,000-paragraph document came back exactly on one undo. A replace large enough that it has to run in more than one pass takes more than one Ctrl+Z, and that is measured too: each pass becomes its own undo step, so you press it repeatedly until the document is back. The add-on says so on screen when a replace ran in several passes.

Where it searches

Tools

Remove empty lines clears blank paragraphs out of the body — the usual mess after pasting from a web page. It counts them and asks first, and Ctrl+Z puts them back. Tables and bulleted lists are left alone, and so is the blank line at the very end of the document: Google does not let an add-on remove that one.

Saved searches

Press Save to keep a search under a name — every condition is stored, not just the text, and comes back exactly as you left it. Saved searches live in your Google account, so they follow you to any document. The free version keeps three; the count never runs down however often you use them.

Export and Import move them between accounts as plain text.

Price

Everything described on this page is in the free version, permanently. There is no trial that expires and no usage counter that runs down. The paid version adds three things.

One limit on that last row, so it is not a surprise later: each run is recorded up to a fixed size, so a run with several hundred replacements is still listed with its count but cannot be undone from the history — the add-on says so on that row, and Ctrl+Z in the document still works. Run a large job in smaller pieces to keep it undoable from the history.

And one limit that does not depend on size: a run that changed formatting is never undoable from the history. The add-on does not record what the formatting was before, so putting only the text back would leave the run half reversed — it marks that row as not undoable instead. Ctrl+Z in the document still undoes it.

The price shown is the total you pay. Sales tax and VAT are included in it, not added at the end. Prices are in US dollars.

Buy a license

Checkout is handled by Lemon Squeezy. You pick Lifetime or Annual on that page, and your license key arrives by email as soon as the payment goes through.

One license covers up to 3 Google accounts. Release license in the add-on's settings frees a slot so you can move it to a different account.

Refunds. Within 14 days of purchase, write to [email protected] and say what went wrong. No justification beyond that is required. The full wording is in the Terms of Service, section 3.

Canceling. Checkout and billing are handled by Lemon Squeezy, which is the seller of record. The receipt email links to their customer portal, and an annual license is canceled there at any time. Canceling stops the renewal; the paid features keep working until the twelve months are up, and the free version keeps working after that.

Activating your key

Your license key is on the confirmation screen right after payment, and in the receipt email. To turn on the paid features:

1. In Google Docs, open Extensions › Find & Replace with Preview › Open Find & Replace.
2. Go to the Settings tab in the sidebar.
3. Paste the key and press Activate key.

One license covers up to 3 Google accounts. To move it to a different account, press Release on this account in the same place — that frees a slot.

The add-on checks the key with Lemon Squeezy at most once every seven days. A single check that cannot reach them switches nothing off: the paid features keep working for up to 14 days after the last check that did succeed. Past that, they stay off until a check gets through again. The free features are not affected either way.

Still stuck?

Common problems and what to put in a bug report are on the support page, or write to [email protected].