For several months, I’ve been a beta tester for Microsoft’s next offering of their Office suite. In this post I’d like to talk about one of my favourite features of most Office (or any programs): Find. This feature has been changed, revamped, and ramped up. It’s all good.
First, a couple of basics: Find (and, Find and Replace) are used to locate items—text and other items—in your documents or files, and in the latter case, to replace them with other items. These two related features are standard Windows components, and have been around for quite a long time. The quickest way to use them in most major applications (including web browsers) is to press CTRL+F. To use Find and Replace (often just called Replace), you press CTRL+H; this won’t work in web browsers, as you usually can’t replace text or other objects on web pages.
In Word 2010, when you press CTRL+F for Find (or click Find, in the Editing group, on the Home tab), the Navigation Pane pops up; in this latest version of the software, it pops up on the left side of the screen. If you’re searching for text, simply type it in the text search box. Word will start the search right away, and then very quickly yellow-highlight all instances of the word(s). Cool.
There’s more to Find than I can cover here, but one of the tantalizing bits I’d like to leave you with is that you can also use it to find graphics, tables, and other objects.
