This Week’s Word: Find

This week’s word is “find”. Let’s say that you have a HUGE document, a 25 page PDF, and you remember that there was a great quote from Steve Jobs that you really want to use in your article, but you just finished reading the article and you have no idea where in those 25 pages that the quote was. This sounds problematic, huh? Do you really want to re-read that whole article for one short little quote? Didn’t think so. Try using “find.”

Find is a feature under “Edit” up in the Menu Bar. You can use it to search within webpages and documents for a certain word. This is different than spotlight which searches your computer and a search engine like Google or Yahoo! which will search the internet, because it actually searches in the text of that document. The way which find will appear varies by the application which you are using it in, but most applications which deal with text will have a find option and many also have a “find and replace” option for things which you can edit. This is handy if you have written an email about Gandi, spell-checked and it and clicked ignore each time “Gandi” came up, only to discover that the actual spelling is “Gandhi”.

Now, how do you use “find”? Go up to “Edit” in the menu bar, and select “Find.” A little box will come up. It may be a free-floating box, or, as with Firefox, it is a little box which attaches itself at the bottom. Type in the word that you want it to find and click “Next.” That word should appear highlighted in the document if it is found. If the word is not actually in that document, you should get some sort of alert telling you “not found.” If you know that the word appears more than once and you want to find it a second time, click, “Next”.

To do a find and replace, you need to be working on a document which you can edit, so obviously it will not work with webpages. But, if you are working on an email, you can just type in the word that you want it to find, then in the box that says “Replace with”, type in the new word that you want to replace it with, of course.  And, click “Replace All”.  That should take care of it for you.

So, there’s the short on using the “find” feature. Any questions?

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