possibly a better approach that would give the same end result to use
styles.  

then you could set each block as a certain style 
"heading", "body text", "emphasised", 

This would allow you to easily change the the style of "emphasised" to
mean whatever you like and have it propogate through the  whole
document.   

At the very least it is a reasonable workaround.  

Msword 97 allows you to replace non printing characters such as tabs
using escaped values ^t represents a tab, it also allows advanced find
and replace based on text formatting

Nevermind, i took a closer look and OpenOffice it is already possible
to do this.  
I would mark this bug as INVALID but I dont have permission.  

create a document containing a whole bunch of words 
the word 'monkey' for example
mark monkey as bold [bold monkey, snigger.  but anyway]

go to 
Edit 
Find and Replace

in the box search for 
fill in the value 
monkey

click on the 'Format...' button 
in the dialog choose the typeface to be bold
click Ok

underneath the label 'Search for' you should see the word bold
and only instances of the word monkey that are bold will be replaced.  
if monkey is not bold it wont be replaced.  

(you can set the formatting for both the word to be found and the
replacement values)


Maintainers/Developers: Any chance i can get my Issuezilla permissions
upgraded so that i can actually do something to move these bug reports
along?  I am nice guy really, the Abiword developers will vouch for me
I am sure.  

it's in Writer the way Alan mentioned it, not in Calc


please use it in Calc also 


this is a defect because all OOo applications should share the same 
framework

TM->FT: Seems to be more a wish for a change in this feature or a wish
for an enhancement than a bug to me. So please have a look, thanks !

Allow format change in Clac (like find "bold" and replace it by "italic")

.

*** Issue 83950 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

It should be possible to search for text with any specific formatting and
replace that text, formatting or both with any other text, formatting or both.

Examples of what should be possible: 
- use regular expressions (or any other method) and change all black,
autoformatted or e. g. "non-blue" text in a spreadsheet to red text.
- not limit the formatting options to things like "bold", "italic" only.
- not tie the feature to styles etc (non-applicable in Calc, presumably), but be
fine-grained enough to work selectively on a text or letter by letter level,
and/or on a cell/block/column/row level - non-globally in the document.

In the Find & Replace dialogue for Calc and Impress/Presentation, the buttons
[Attributes...], [Format...] and [No Format] are missing. Using the format
painter doesn't seem to work either in this context.

This is available and works Writer.

*** Issue 109094 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on
my owner to the owner "requirements". 

*** Issue 124458 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

Status due to facts