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How to Find and Replace Text in Adobe Acrobat DC

By Erin Wright 11 Comments

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.

Image of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC Edit Tab | How to Find and Replace Text in Adobe Acrobat DC

Pro Tip: PC users can type Ctrl + F instead of selecting the Edit tab and the Find option.

3. Enter the word that you want to find in the Find text box.

Image of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC Find Panel | How to Find and Replace Text in Adobe Acrobat DC

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.

Image of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC Find Panel with the Replace With Option Highlighted | How to Find and Replace Text in Adobe Acrobat DC

7. Enter the replacement word in the Replace with text box.

Image of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC Find Panel with text in the Replace With Text Box | How to Find and Replace Text in Adobe Acrobat DC

8. Select the Next button to find the next occurrence of the word.

Image of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC Find Panel Next Button | How to Find and Replace Text in Adobe Acrobat DC

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.

Image of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC Find Panel Replace Button | How to Find and Replace Text in Adobe Acrobat DC

10. Continue to select the Next and Replace buttons until Acrobat tells you that it has finished searching the document.

Image of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC All Matches Found Dialog Box | How to Find and Replace Text in Adobe Acrobat DC

Pro Tip: After you replace the first occurrence of the word, you can select the Replace Next button to automatically replace the next occurrence. However, beware of automatically inserting a replacement word with incorrect capitalization for the sentence positioning.

If you would like to learn more about working with PDFs, check out my other easy-to-follow Adobe Acrobat DC tutorials.

11 Comments Filed Under: Adobe Acrobat Tagged With: Acrobat Standard, Adobe Acrobat DC

Home » How to Find and Replace Text in Adobe Acrobat DC

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Technical Writer and Editor Erin WrightHello! My name is Erin. I am a technical writer and editor who shares step-by-step software tutorials and writing tips for the real world on this blog and YouTube

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Comments

  1. Gerd says

    July 25, 2018 at 8:05 am

    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.

    Reply
    • Erin Wright says

      July 25, 2018 at 9:55 am

      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!

      Reply
  2. Geoffrey says

    October 2, 2018 at 6:12 am

    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

    Reply
    • Erin Wright says

      October 2, 2018 at 7:15 am

      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

      Reply
  3. Cindy Doty says

    November 24, 2019 at 11:09 pm

    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?

    Reply
    • Erin Wright says

      November 25, 2019 at 6:36 am

      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.

      Reply
  4. Richard Friel says

    December 30, 2019 at 4:35 pm

    How do you close the find/replace dialog after you are done?

    Reply
  5. Richard Friel says

    December 30, 2019 at 4:58 pm

    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.

    Reply
    • Erin Wright says

      December 30, 2019 at 5:16 pm

      I’m glad you found it. Thank you for visiting my blog!

      Reply
  6. Bill Christie says

    February 26, 2021 at 2:34 pm

    Is it possible to use Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to find and replace text for all PDF docs in a folder?

    Reply
    • Erin Wright says

      March 1, 2021 at 6:53 am

      Thank you for visiting. Unfortunately, Acrobat doesn’t offer a find-and-replace option for folders (at least not one that I know of). I do hope Adobe will consider adding that feature in the future.

      Reply

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