Today’s tutorial explains how to find and replace text in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC and Acrobat Standard DC.
Acrobat’s find-and-replace tool is similar to Microsoft Word’s find-and-replace tool but offers fewer options. For example, Word lets us find and simultaneously replace all occurrences of a word based on nine parameters; whereas Acrobat’s find-and-replace tool offers four parameters and only replaces one occurrence at a time.
Despite these limitations, Acrobat’s find-and-replace tool is invaluable when editing PDFs—particularly long PDFs. If you just need to find text, Acrobat’s Advanced Search helps you find partial or whole words in one or multiple PDFs. Visit “How to Search Multiple PDFs with Adobe Acrobat’s Advanced Search” for a full tutorial.
This tutorial is also available as a YouTube video showing all the steps in real time.
Watch more than fifty other videos about Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat on my YouTube channel.
For simplicity, the steps below refer to finding and replacing one word. However, you can also use these steps to find and replace multiple consecutive words and number strings.
Find and Replace Text in Adobe Acrobat DC
1. Select the Edit tab.
2. Select Find.
3. Enter the word that you want to find in the Find text box.
4. Select the down arrow to open the options menu.
5. Select a parameter (if necessary): Whole Words Only, Case Sensitive, Include Bookmarks, or Include Comments. You can select multiple parameters by selecting the down arrow again.
6. Select Replace with.
7. Enter the replacement word in the Replace with text box.
8. Select the Next button to find the next occurrence of the word.
9. Select the Replace button to make the replacement. If necessary, edit the word in the Replace with text box before selecting the Replace button. For example, you may have to alter capitalization to match sentence positioning.
10. Continue to select the Next and Replace buttons until Acrobat tells you that it has finished searching the document.
If you would like to learn more about working with PDFs, check out my other easy-to-follow Adobe Acrobat DC tutorials.
This does not work as you get the error message “Unable to highlight text across multiple text boxes.” as soon as you have entered anything in the Replace field and try to start the search.
This error prevents you from performing the text replace operation.
Hi, Gerd. I just tested the find and replace tool in Adobe Acrobat DC Pro, running on Windows 10, and it worked just fine. I didn’t encounter that error message. I hope the error message you saw was just a temporary glitch. Best of luck!
Hi Erin,
Very interesting. Thanks. I am facing an issue to replace by batch some words which are not whole.
Refer to point 5, all the options in the dropdown list can be selected at this stage.
Nevertheless as soon as i push the button “Replace with” (stage #6), if i come back to the dropdowlist, the options are grayed and the option “Whole words only” is selected by default.
Is it correct?
Would you have any suggestions on how to unlock this?
Best regards, Geoffrey
Good morning, Geoffrey.
Thank you for reading my blog! As far as I know, Acrobat doesn’t allow us to replace partial words, so “Whole words only” is the default. If I find a way to change that default, I will be sure to update this post. If you have Microsoft Word, one solution may be to convert a copy of your PDF to a Word file, use Word’s replace tool (which allows partial replacements) and then convert the Word file back to a PDF. I hope that helps!
Erin
I am using the free version and the Find box will allow me to find a word, but it does not give me the option to replace. Is this because I am only using the free version?
Hi, Cindy. Thank you for visiting my blog! You are correct; Adobe’s free software, Acrobat Reader, only has a Find function, not a Replace function.
How do you close the find/replace dialog after you are done?
Never mind – I finally found the “X” in the upper right hand of the dialog box.
It wasn’t showing up – i had to look real close to the screen to see it.
I’m glad you found it. Thank you for visiting my blog!