Add a Search-and-replace tool into Grist

[RaywanS]

Hi folks,

As i'm doing a lot of Excel-to-Grist imports, I notice that I often have A LOT to search-and-replace stuff to do.
I think it's obvious but I can share my last use-case to explain : especially when it's about getting a Boolean True/False column. I have in my excel spreadsheet some "X" or "Oui" or "OK" on let's say 10 columns, so I have to copy-past formulas and then re-adapt it.

Of course, I use formulas to ease the task but it can be time-consuming and also it's not super-friendly - a non-coder won't be able to do it.

So my request is quite simple : in an ideal world, I can have an option per column to search-and-replace text or numbers.

WDYT?

Thanks
Raywan from ANCT

[Dmitry]

To help collect requirements, here's what Excel supports (at least on the Mac version):

It offers options to:

• Search only the current sheet, or across all sheets.
• Search by rows or by columns (the latter makes it easier to work through one column even though there isn't an option to restrict the scan to a single column)
• Case sensitive or not
• Match entire cell content or any substring

I also see that it supports wildcards (e.g. * matches any sequence of characters), and that it matches numbers as text (e.g. "3.7" will match "473.72").

[Casper]

I would love to see this as well.

What I am currently doing is:

• convert column to choice
• rename a single choice to true
• save/apply
• remove true choice
• rename other options that are true, one by one
• do the same with false

Might not be the most effective way, but it works fairly well for me.

Luckily once I'm done with my imported excel sheet, I won't have to do it again, but still, a search and replace option would be nice to see.

See gif: https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/assets/38324207/cb63f2ec-1ddf-461c-931d-b2a0030f8dde

Edit: GIF added