Find and replace not working for apostrophe

Hi all. I did a find and replace to change the equal sign (=) to the word "highlight". That was so I could email the file to another person and they could reverse it so the formulas were correct at their end instead of trying to find linked workbooks on my computer. At the other end I did the opposite and did find and replace to change "highlight" to an = sign. It worked on some but not all formulas. In a pretty large number it did the replacement and added an apostrophe ' in front of it which means the formula is now text. I tried F&R to just remove the apostrophe and it won't do it. There are still about 20K formulas to fix so line editing isn't really a good option.

I am sort of baffled as I can't think of anything I did wrong. Any insights or advice would be really appreciated.

OK. I am really about to pull out my hair. I realized I didn't put up an example or anything.

'=IF($P$2=TRUE,XLOOKUP(A9,'[USER FILE.xlsb]SUPERMARKET'!A:A,'[USER FILE.xlsb]SUPERMARKET'!AC:AC,0),MAX(XLOOKUP(A9,'[USER FILE.xlsb]SUPERMARKET'!A:A,XLOOKUP(B6,'[USER FILE.xlsb]SUPERMARKET'!B2:AE2,'[USER FILE.xlsb]SUPERMARKET'!B:AE)),ROUNDUP(XLOOKUP(A9,Usage!B:B,Usage!P:P,0),0)))

I need to get that leading apostrophe out. There are about 20K variations of that formula that have the leading apostrophe.

Yes Ma'am. The issue is that I already did the initial find and replace. I tried using | instead of a word but when I tried to replace | with = what I got was '= anyway. It's my own fault for not making a copy of the file first and thus preserving one that wasn't messed up.

Originally Posted by Glenn Kennedy

Select the column(s) containing the formulae, one at a time.

Data/Text to columns/Delimited/Finish

This solution work great! Thank you.