Find and replace
It seems off that there's no 'find and replace' feature in Zendesk Guide. The editor is very limited in terms of what it can do, is this on the roadmap?
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Official comment
Hi All,
Thank you for all your feedback and comments about Guide Editor, they are very important for us. As I read this thread I see three main requests:
- Add more styling functionality to the editor
- Add Find & Replace functionality within an article to use while editing it.
- Add a quick way to change and replace links, words, and phrases in bulk across the whole knowledge base.
I'm happy to say that improving the editing experience in Guide is one of our main focuses for 2022. Throughout next year, we plan to upgrade our WYSIWIG and change e.g. how we work with tables, add new styling tools, callouts, and more tools to work with images. Prior to enabling all these new capabilities, we have to do some groundwork to ensure that none of the existing content is impacted by the new rich text formatting tool we are implementing. I'm glad to say that this work has already started.
Once we finalize the technical part of this upgrade we should be also able to add Find & Replace feature inside the article editor. Thank you for raising this request in the Community. I've added it to our backlog of editor improvements and I'd expect that it'll be introduced next year as well.
Regarding a quick way to change and replace links, words, and phrases in bulk across the whole knowledge base it sounds to me more like a request for reusing small pieces of content than strictly an editor improvement. Within the content reusability initiative, we are starting to think about placeholder feature that would allow our customers to easily update simple strings across their whole knowledge base. We are at the early stages with this one so I'm not able to confirm any timelines. -
Hi Zoe,
Thanks for sharing your feedback. The editor isn't one of the areas of focus for the current development cycle, but it could be considered in the future.
If other users are interested in similar find and replace type of functionality, please up-vote Zoe's post, and add any details in the comments below. -
This would be amazing. I often find myself copy/pasting all the HTML into an external editor to find and replace multiple items and then pasting it back in but it would be great to have that functionality in Zendesk.
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YES! Find and Replace would be a massive help!
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Hi Casey & Alex,
How frequently does this need come up for you? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
How many articles do you think you would use it on? -
For us it would be weekly to monthly we when need to replace links to a software program or other items that get updated normally.
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Plus one for adding this feature - we don't need it regularly but when we do it'd be a huge value add.
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Hi Nicole,
It's really disappointing to hear that the article editor is not one of the features in the development cycle as it seems like it's definitely in need of some attention. There's a good few features it would benefit from having including find and replace, co-editing, image uploading enhancements, hyperlinking enhancements, more styling tools, etc.
When will the article editor be in the development cycle? -
I would say we would probably use it weekly. Over time, it could be hundreds of articles.
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We would use it irregularly but for lots of articles at once.
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Just found out that there is already a find and replace tool.
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Having a full-function WYSIWYG editior is very important to us!
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It would be crucial for us to have this type of functionality, to update links, words, and phrases in bulk. We'll have to update a link in hundreds of articles soon
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Hi,
I think this would be a great piece of functionality to have.
Inline with what others have said - I think that one of the biggest challenges for my Support team in using Guide is the editor being a little bit lacklustre, particularly when compared to something like JIRA Service Management and how rich it's editor is.
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Our use case involves harmonizing the naming conventions between two of our applications (one of which was an acquisition). There are a few terms that need to be replaced with something new throughout the whole help center.
Doing this manually will be very time-consuming.
This will be a one-time project, as opposed to an ongoing process.
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This would be a must have for any knowledge base. It is a very big issue for us.
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Hello,
Regarding the part where you say:
"Regarding a quick way to change and replace links, words, and phrases in bulk across the whole knowledge base it sounds to me more like a request for reusing small pieces of content than strictly an editor improvement. Within the content reusability initiative, we are starting to think about placeholder feature that would allow our customers to easily update simple strings across their whole knowledge base. We are at the early stages with this one so I'm not able to confirm any timelines."
It is not just about creating a placeholder for a content. Yes, that would be helpful.
However, we have a very large knowledge base (several hundreds of articles) and the way the linking is done (untraceable) we have to maintain old articles instead of archiving them. This leads us to the point where we NEED to be able to find and replace content in the whole knowledge base. Place holders are good for that point on, but it doesn't go back into your hundreds of articles to update strategic words selection.
We cannot have someone working full time just to update words here and there. With the way digital is going, we need to be able to program repetitive actions so they take 2 minutes to perform, not weeks.
The placeholder feature helps your new customers, but it doesn't help as much your long-standing customers who have a large knowledge base.
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Hi @..., thank you for taking the time to explain your case. I can see how important the search/replace across the whole knowledge base is for you and other customers with large knowledge bases. We don't have this change of our most immediate roadmap but I'll log your feedback and keep it in mind for the future.
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Hi,
I'm looking for the find and replace in the public response area of Zendesk. Not sure I need it across knowledge base (new user). Is this what is intended in the above mentioned addition?
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Hi, one more thing, do we have an estimation on availability of the tool?
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Hi Mary Rockwood,
Yes, we should be able to add find/replace in the articles in 2022. But I don't have a detailed timeline just yet.
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What I'm looking for is the ability to find and replace a work or phrase - for example, if I am renaming one of our products from "Chrome" to "Pita Browser", I want to be able to do that in bulk and not go one by one in 500 articles!!!
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I have the same issue as Sidney. If I need to change a product's name, I need a way to do it without a massive manual content review. A global find/replace would save weeks of review time
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+1 this would be extremely useful when updating the terminology within all articles. For example, we are renaming Subspaces to Folders for Taskade our app across all articles in http://help.taskade.com/ and would have to do this manually, unfortunately.
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I'd like to expand upon this request to be a true find & replace across multiple articles.
Business case: If a company decides to change the name of any feature of an application, particularly something referred to quite a bit in articles, the only way to find the name of that feature would be to scan all of the articles we "think" would contain that information and manually replace the words.
Example: Our company is converting from older RPG programming to web-based code. As we move more content to the web we are of trying to update the naming conventions of our products. We changed the name of many of our features from short sometimes hard to remember command names that used to be typed into a green screen application to much more understandable titles for "buttons" in the web. Just one of those commands was located in over 100 articles because it is used so often. In our current content creator, RoboHelp, we were able to do a find and replace in a single project that contained all of those articles. A single step. If I were to use Guide I would have to do this for 100+ articles...
If Guide is to become a true content creator we need the basics that other content creators already have.
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+1,000 to Shana Blackstone's feedback!
Find/Replace within an article is important, but could be worked around with Cmd/Ctrl+F in a browser for a one-off change.
Find/Replace across the entire Guide's dataset is even more impactful to which there is no effective workaround. If you have hundreds or thousands of articles, you're in for a lot of Cmd+F :( -
Also +1000 to Shana's feedback and Dan's find/replace across our whole Zendesk environment would save a massive amount of time.
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Just curious if there's an ETA for find and replace in Guide yet. We're working on a massive permissions overhaul and need to update the mentions of our permissions titles across our entire Help Center. It would be magical if find and replace in Guide were available when we make this change (early 2022).
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Hi everybody,
I'm planning to implement the find & replace function across multiple articles in my new Zendesk app: Help Center Manager. It's still work in progress but please register your interest to get notified of its release.
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Hi Jodi Peters, we don't have a timeline for this change just yet.
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