I’m using project replace to change some tenses, and so when i put change “was” to “were” (selecting for only text) it doesn’t change them, as you can see in the screenshot, where “feds are” isn’t changed to “Feds were.” Same for all the other documents in the draft folder.
Answering my own question here. It occurred to me that “Whole words only” was to avoid replacing that string of letters inside other words…but I had placed the spaces on either side of the search terms. So I took those spaces out and it worked. Not sure why, but it seems to be working now. Hope it helps someone else. Just be sure to keep “Whole words only” checked in the search pane.
It looks from your screen shot that you asked the program to look for ".are " rather than " are " — you put a full stop before the word ‘are’ rather than a space.