Getting That Find and Replace Box Out Of the Way!

Do you ever feel that Word is trying to get in your way? Most of us use the Find and Replace function in our word processing. Sometimes we use it a lot, particularly when we are cleaning up documents, a situation where we sometimes change our search criterion frequently, and also where we might easily be locating a hundred or more instances of a "find" criterion.

Ever Get that "Jumpy" Feeling?

The problem that is often encountered in using the Find and Replace function is that when we enter the search criterion in the Find what: area of the Find and Replace dialog box, and click the dialog box Find Next button or Replace button, the dialog box shows a tendency to jump around on the screen. Often, the result is that the text that is "found" (highlighted) is obscured by the box. You drag the dialog box to the top or bottom of the screen so that you can get a clear view of your text, and when you click the Find Next or Replace button again, it jumps back fair and square into the centre of the screen, obscuring your text once more. You have to keep pulling the box out of the way, a frustrating and time consuming procedure. If you have a large monitor (19 inch or bigger) this jumping around may not happen, but most of us use 15 or 17 inch display units.

There's a smart way to get around this nasty sort of behaviour. It involves using the Split function, a very useful feature in Word that enables you to divide the working screen into two sections so that you can work with two parts of the same document simultaneously. First, you use the Window|Split menu sequence to invoke this function. When you do this, the cursor becomes a horizontal line with an up-arrow down-arrow icon attached to it. You choose where you want the split (the point of division between the two sections) to be placed, and click the mouse. This "drops" the horizontal line, and your screen is split into two windows - or panes, as they are called. (You can pick up the "Split line" at any time with the mouse and resize the panes. The Split function is turned off via the Window |Remove Split menu sequence, or simply by picking up the horizontal line with the mouse and dragging it off the top or bottom of the screen.)

Setting the First "Active" Pane

The next step is to click the mouse into the pane where you want the Find and Replace dialog box to be held. Clicking into a pane makes it the "active" pane. You can lock the box into the top or bottom pane, but fixing it into the top pane has an advantage (mentioned below). You then use the Edit|Find menu sequence to open the Find and Replace dialog box, and drag the box into the active pane if it's not already there. In Figure 1, the top pane has been made the active pane and the Find and Replace dialog box sits inside it and is confined to it.

Setting the Second "Active" Pane

Now that you have "locked" the dialog box into a pane, you enter your search criterion into the Find what: area of the box. You then click the mouse into the document text in the other pane. This makes the other pane the "active" pane. When you now click the Find Next button or Replace button, instances of the search text are located and highlighted in the second pane. In Figure 1, the word "text" has been searched for and the search result is highlighted in the lower pane.

You can now just keep clicking the Find Next button or Replace button. The dialog box won't move outside its pane, and all your instances of located text are displayed in the other pane.

Other benefits of using the Split Function with Find and Replace

Figure 1. The Split function being exploited to lock the Find and Replace
dialog box into a defined section of the Word working screen. The dialog
box is held in the top pane, and the search results are shown in the upper
part of the bottom pane. The highlighted text is never hidden by the dialog
box, and you don’t have to look all around the screen to find it.

If you lock the dialog box into the top pane, you get the added advantage that all your highlighted text appears on the first or second line of the lower pane. This means you don't have to look around the screen to find your highlighted text. This may seem a small matter, but if you use Word a lot you will really notice the increase in working speed and lower degree of eye fatigue that results. Even if you work with a large monitor and the Find and Replace box doesn't jump around when you use it, exploiting the Split function in this way can be worth it for these benefits alone.

Also, Figure 1 displays the "resize" icon of the Split function. The cursor has been moved over the "Split line" (see just below the left hand end of the Find and Replace box), and has changed into the up-arrow down-arrow resize icon (the hypertext box beneath the icon displays the "Resize" label). You can also see that each pane has its own vertical scroll bar, another useful feature of the Split function.