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Please Help: Find/Change within a table. Change only the second instance

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    • January 20, 2021 at 4:35 am #14334941
      Saugé King
      Member

      Hi there, I am new to InDesign

      I have made a planner in InDesign and I have made a mistake on the scheduling pages.
      I have a table with rows and columns, sometimes three columns, sometimes more. in the first column there are times on every other row.
      I have repeated 5pm where it should be 6pm so I have duplicate 5pm on over 365 pages in the planner.
      I spent hours on the internet last night trying to find a solution and tried all sorts of find/change options including trying to use tab metacharacters like so: 5pm^t^t^t5pm and the GREP equivalent

      I could do it all manually skipping the first 5pm and changing the second, but I don’t relish doing this nearly 400 times, plus I have another 8 versions of the planner with the same problem that i will need to change too. And if I do it manually, there is a great risk of error which will be even harder to detect.

      In Microsoft Word, I can just copy the cells and paste them into the find field and replace the offending 5pm that way so I am finding it very frustrating not to be able to do that with InDesign

      Has anyone got any idea how I can run a find/change and be able to “change all” in one go in the entire document/s

      Thank you

    • January 20, 2021 at 7:38 am #14334942
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      If you can do this in Word, you can probably do it the same way in InDesign. But I don’t see how you can do this in Word the way you describe. (At least I can’t when I try.)

      If it were just changing 5pm to 6pm, it would be easy, but because you have two instances of “5 pm” in each table, it makes it tricky. InDesign doesn’t really have a good way to search for text in multiple cells.

      Is it just a single table? Or 365 different tables?

    • January 20, 2021 at 9:46 am #14334947
      Saugé King
      Member

      Hello David.

      Thank you for your reply

      Yes, it is indeed 365 different tables, one table per page.

      Just tried it in Word again, and you are right, it doesn’t find the row. My mistake.

      My head is exploding trying to think of another way to do it. Some kind of work around, script, anything that will mean that I don’t have to do it over 3,285 (with the other 8 versions included) manually. I wish I had done a better check before I over-rid (is that a word) all the the master page items on these pages.

      If you have any other ideas at all David, I would be extremely grateful

      Thank you

    • January 20, 2021 at 4:42 pm #14334995
      Saugé King
      Member

      I decided to bit the bullet and go through it manually.

      Surprisingly, it took a lot less time and wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be.

      Thank you for taking the time to try and help me, I really appreciate it

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