Limitations & Warnings

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From version 4.0.0 and higher ReplaceMagic does not depend on additional applications (like Microsoft Office). ReplaceMagic will access your documents directly.

If you have ReplaceMagic up-to version 3.2.9 on computer where you installed ReplaceMagic you will need to have following applications (in case that you want to make changes in all file types that ReplaceMagic supports):

  • MS-Word
  • MS-Excel
  • MS-PowerPoint
  • MS-Project
  • MS-Visio


  1. In case that you do not have some of application you will not be able to change search strings in that kind of files but ReplaceMagic will work without any problems.
  2. If you bought Professional version which supports search&replace over the network you will need to provide network connection if you want to search for files on some other computer.
  3. It is necessary that you are running application with user who has local administrator rights.
  4. In case that you want to access network mapped drives please run RM under credentials of user who mapped network drives. If, for example, drives are mapped under one user but you run RM with Local Admin account mapped drives might not be visible. This is Window limit!
  5. You will need to have enough user rights (read and write right) to access network computer and to open files.
  6. In MS-Project and MS-Visio links under OLE-Objects can not be changed.
  7. It is important that all files where you want to make search&replace are closed before you start to use ReplaceMagic. Otherwise RM will report that documents are not accessible
  8. Application performances are connected with size and complexity of documents.
  9. (only in versions to 3.2.9) If you scan Visio file that have broken links you will need to click on Ok to process links and that is limitation by Microsoft Visio. After you click on Ok ReplaceMagic will continue with processing of files.
  10. (only in versions to 3.2.9) If scanned file is damaged it may happen that application used to open it comes with popup asking you what to do. In that case you will need to click on something to continue with scanning.
  11. If you have some anti-virus software turn it off because when ReplaceMagic starts to open documents anti-virus will scan them also. Of course, you can leave anti-virus on but then you need to except to have slowdown in performances.
  12. (only in versions to 3.2.9) If you notice that ReplaceMagic is stuck on one file for some long time most likely this is happening because some of background Microsoft applications is trying to display a dialog box. In that case simply press Alt+Tab to get this dialog and clear it. When you do that ReplaceMagic will continue to work normally.
  13. Do not have open any of Microsoft applications before you start to work with ReplaceMagic because when you close it, ReplaceMagic will close all Microsoft applications no matter who started them.
  14. ReplaceMagic does not support changes of Data Connection in older Excel document formats (extensions with 3 letters like xls or similar).
  15. Claims authentication on SharePoint is in BETA mode. In case of issues please contact ReplaceMagic team (support@replacemagic.com).
  16. LinkSource processing in PowerPoint documents when chart is based on Excel document does not work.
  17. To be able to keep LastModifiedDate, Author and Editor during native SharePoint processing user used to logon to SharePoint HAS to be in Site Administrator Collection
  18. Per default ReplaceMagic saves last selected location for processing. In case that last location was based on HTTP or HTTPS (SharePoint) ReplaceMagic will replace is with local drive as processing cannot start as SharePoint logon data are not kept (for security reasons)
  19. Proxy - If you use proxy servers ReplaceMagic can work only if proxy does not require username and password. This means we will use default Windows proxy configured which you can see if you check proxy configuration of Windows or in Internet Explorer.
  20. ReplaceMagic does not support charts (Link Sources) in older PowerPoint formats.
  21. Changes of array or table formulas is not supported as they are across different locations
  22. Check of broken links in documents stored in SharePoint might not work - ReplaceMagic is sending simple request to link location and depending on response we will report if link is broken or not. As SharePoint might require authentication and we use simple .NET anonymous request you will see, probably, error message 403 Forbidden as anonymous requests are not allowed. Problem here is that in your links there might be tons of different SharePoint sites and for each of them we will need to create separate SharePoint context with authentication and then to use it when checking links which will be very slow and overkill for processing performances. Additionally, your user might not have enough permissions to access those locations. In case of SharePoint, indicator if links are broken or not most likely will not work.
  23. Documents stored on SharePoint might stay checked-out - in case that ReplaceMagic configuration is set to check-out/check-in documents, if during document processing after check-out but before checking-in documents, we experience SharePoint throttling (error message 429 or 503), which will cause that document is skipped, document might stay checked-out. Unfortunately, this cannot be controlled so if this is concern please do not use check-out/check-in functionality. 
    Side effect when check-out/check-in functionality is not used is that ReplaceMagic will not be able to keep publish (major/minor version) or approval status as check-out/check-in is required for it.
  24. Links in SharePoint Wiki pages - in case that you have relative links, for example /SomeFolder/Sample/book.xlsx, in pages which are in site with URL like https://replacamagic.sharepoint.com, which you want to convert to absolute links like https://replacemagic.sharepoint.com/Shared Documents/Sample/book.xlsx ReplaceMagic will trigger this change but after saving content to SharePoint, SharePoint will remove starting URL as it is the same like starting URL of document containing this link so when you rescan document again you will see that your link is changed from /SomeFolder/Sample/book.xlsx to /Shared Documents/Sample/book.xlsx. Unfortunately, this is not controlled by ReplaceMagic. 
    Of course, when you properly set links new relative link will also work.
  25. It might happen that links in PDF documents created with 3rd party tools like Nitro or similar are not recognized.
  26. In case of Excel files having data connections to other documents:

    ReplaceMagic can make change but next time when file is opened and saved Excel will overwrite link in Connection string with temporary file which most likely will not work anymore.
  27. When processing SharePoint pages and using regular expression please keep in mind that processing is not on link level but on page level so regular expression like ^https:\/\/company.sharepoint.com\/(.*) will not have match as page does not start with https but with some of normal HTML tags.
  28. ReplaceMagic reads documents and follows strict document object model defined by Microsoft or Adobe. As there might be 3rd party applications used to create documents (Office of PDF formats) in case that they deviate to defined specification might happen that ReplaceMagic cannot read document and will report it in skipped documents tab but Office and/or Adobe apps might have flexibility to ignore deviations meaning that document can be opened in them. In this case, please share affected documents with ReplaceMagic team and give us permission to open ticket with our partner whose components we use for further investigation. Without affected document(s) and permission to open ticket with our partner we will not be able to help. Still even that does not guarantee that we will be able to process those documents and you need to count that some smaller number of files will stay skipped/unprocessed. ReplaceMagic cannot ensure that all documents will be processed.
  29. SharePoint 2010 (or older) is not supported.
  30. Import of previously scanned SharePoint documents does not work (pre-release 2023.1.x).
  31. Due to recently introduces throttling resource limits per request (see MSFT article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/general-development/how-to-avoid-getting-throttled-or-blocked-in-sharepoint-online, last update from 03/20/2023), if you continue to access SharePoint with high parallelism after being throttled Microsoft might reject all requests from ReplaceMagic. Strong recommendation is not to run with more than 2 documents in parallel.
  32. Multiple users for SharePoint authentication are supported only if authentication mode of all users is the same (for example, all users are created with WebLogon or SharePoint.Online authentication).
  33. ReplaceMagic has to be installed under user who will use it as only that is ensuring that license and needed configuration files can be created and used during document processing. Installation under one user or with "Run as Administrator" is not supported.
  34. ReplaceMagic cannot process documents protected with AD RMS. It is customer sole responsibility to remove protection to allow ReplaceMagic to read content of the documents.
  35. Without providing Azure Information Protection / Microsoft Information Protection credentials, ReplaceMagic cannot process documents protected in this way. More infos under: Support for Microsoft Information Protection