Just about every text editor has some kind of search and replace tool which allows you to process data in the file you’re editing. Even Notepad includes a Replace option which can run a case-sensitive search across your entire document, replacing defined text with whatever you like, and all in a click.

What if you want to tweak text case, though? Add or remove text? Insert line numbers, or apply some other more advanced editing option? Then you might need Replace Genius. This smart tool – once a commercial product, now free – allows you to perform a host of processing options on plain text files, as well as Word and Excel documents (if Office is installed). And it really is very impressive indeed.

This starts with the program’s range of functions. As you’d expect from its name, you get an option to search one or more files for a particular item of text and replace it with something else. But that’s just the start. The program can also trim unwanted spaces; change text case; add line numbers; manipulate existing numbers in the document; delete specified text, move text around, and the list goes on.

A Preview window lets you see the results of your processing right away

Each of these options has real depth. Select the “Casing” option, say, and you can set your text to be all upper case, all lower case, sentence case (“First letter capitalised”), inverted or random case. There are useful exceptions, too, so for instance you can tell Replace Genius to leave all mixed case words as they are.

The application itself is packed with powerful supporting features. You can use wildcards and regular expressions to precisely define text, for example; commonly-used commands can be saved for reuse later, and you’re able to batch process multiple documents in a single operation.

And yet, despite all this functionality, Replace Genius makes a real effort to be easy to use. Open a document and choose the “Casing” command, say, and a preview window displays your text before and after processing. Click any of the conversion options and you’ll immediately see the results. And this means you’re able to freely experiment, try different options and discover how they work right away, a great way to quickly learn the program basics.