I don't know how this functionality is called, but I think Word had it for years. Basically, I want to do something like this:
{Character1} just got out of his bed when he heard a loud noise outside.
Where every instance of "{Character1}" is replaced later with "John":
John just got out of his bed when he heard a loud noise outside.
No, I'm not looking for a simple search and replace function, I want to know if I could add commonly used words, like a name in a story for example, to some sort of database and refer to that in the text, so that if I ever end up changing the name of the character, it will automatically get replaced everywhere.
Is there a functionality like that in Google Docs? If not, how is it called in Word? I've been looking for it forever, I just don't know how to refer to it.