How to replace the end of a file name

Hi MP,

The Find and Replace box is here: Menu > Edit > Find > Find...

Find .jpg replace with .nef

This will replace all occurences of .jpg in a document (even on other sheets). If you have some that you don't want replacing, move them to another document first.

As far as I know, there is no book for Numbers 3. The Numbers Help Menu has Formulas and Functions help (online, not a downloadable manual).

You might find the Function Browser useful. It appears when you type = in a cell.

Regards,

Ian.

"If you have some that you don't want replacing, move them to another document first."

Or if all the ones you want to replace are in column A, but you have other occurences of .jpg outside that column that you want to keep, do the opposite—take a copy of the column out of the document, Find/Repalce, Put the column of edited data back into the original document. Here are the steps:

Select and Copy all of column A.

Open a new Numbers document.

Select cell A1 and Paste.

Do Find/Replace using .jpg in Find and .nef in replace. Choose Replace All.

Select and copy all of column A.

Go back to the original document and table.

Select cell A1 and Paste.

Regards,

Barry

Or just use this 'Find Replace in Selection' Automator Service (Dropbox download) without having to fuss about taking columns out to another app, fiddling with them there, and bring them back in.

It is just a short AppleScript that, after a quick installation, will look like this in your menu:

Select the cells where you want to make the replacement, choose 'Find Replace in Selection' from the menu, and enter the find-replace values when prompted. In your case you will see something like this:

Hit OK and you're done.

One-time installation is just a doubleclick on the .workflow package.

Depending on your settings you may have to go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy and click 'Open Anyway'.

'Install' simply moves the script to your Library > Services folder so it will show up in your Numbers menu. It doesn't do anything to the innards of your computer. If you want, you can check out the script first by choosing 'Open with Automator'.

Since this (obviously) changes values in your document you might want to test it first to make sure it is working as you want.

If you need to get rid of it then in Finder hold down the option key, choose Go in the menu and navigate to Library > Services, where you can trash it the way you would any other file or package in Finder.

SG

Edit: use jpg and nef rather than .jpg and .nef.

This is a really nice script. One thing I changed when I installed it was to remove "considering case" in the findReplace handler. The built-in find/replace does not consider case when "finding" and I like it that way.

Thanks. So that change would make it case insensitive, I think. Any idea why, in the original script, replacing jpg with nef works but replacing .jpg and .nef (i.e. leading periods or dots) seems to replace only the first instance found?

SG