A Fast Find-Next

Summary: Want a quick, easy way to "search again" for the next occurrence of what you need? Use the technique in this tip and you'll be finding what you need faster than ever. (This tip works with Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, Word 2003, and Word 2007.)

Word provides a fast, efficient, and flexible searching feature. Using the Find option from the Edit menu, you can search for just about anything in your document. I find myself using Find quite often in the course of creating a document, but there is one thing about Find that bothers me. I hate having the Find dialog box block part of my document as I am stepping through occurrences of a search string in my document. Clicking on Find Next works great, but that bothersome dialog box is still blocking my view.

To overcome this, I generally do the following when I am searching for something:

Use the Find feature as normal (Ctrl+F), specifying what I want to search for and then looking for the first occurrence of the string.
When the first occurrence is displayed, I press the Esc key (or click on Cancel).
To find the next occurrence, I press Shift+F4.

This procedure works the same as clicking Find Next repeatedly, and it is just as fast, but it gets rid of the annoying Find dialog box.

Tip #974 applies to Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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A Fast Find-Next