The Find function is indispensable when working on large chunks of text.
Press Command and type F to open the Find window.
If you are not familiar with the term, the Command key is the wider one in the bottom row of the keyboard.
Then, type the word, word combination, or part of a word in the window, and presto! You can scan a very large text—hundreds of pages—in seconds, to find what you are looking for.
Take, for instance, a situation when you edit—or just read—a book and notice that a female character is described as having shiny auburn hair on page 187. You definitely remember that she was a redhead earlier in the text. But on what page?
Type redhead and click on Previous to find the relevant passage.
And there she is, a redhead, on page 23. Of course, sometimes people do change their hair color. But it's also true that even the best writers can sometimes forget how they described their characters, for example, in Tolstoy's War and Peace, Prince Andrei has grey eyes in one chapter and blue in another.
Click on Next to scan forward and see if the error appears further on in the text.
Or, you might notice that a name or a particular word is spelt in different ways. Is it a mistake? Should it be corrected? Do you need a cross-reference?
Take the word "kabuki", a form of traditional Japanese theatre. Is it "kabuki" or "cabuki" or "kobuki"? Check the word in the dictionary and then click on Find and Replace to scan the text and substitute the correct spelling throughout.
Or the word "czar", which originally means an East European absolutist monarch, but in modern political usage is also used to describe a specially created official position with authority to deal with a particular problem. The word can be spelled, correctly, "tzar" or "tsar"—reflecting the phonetics of the original Russian word—or even "czar", a spelling that incorporates the Roman-Byzantine etymology of Caesar.
Choose either the one you prefer or the most commonly used spelling, and correct throughout, by using Next or Find and Replace.
This will avoid inconsistencies in your text and will make indexing and referencing clear.
The Find function works practically everywhere that we deal with text. Here are some examples.
If you work with a particular style, the Find function can also help you here. For instance, you have a text where there is a double space after each full stop but your company's house style demands only a single space after each sentence. In such a case, follow the ensuing steps:
- Open the Find window, and type
.(dot) and two spaces. - In the Replace window, type
.(dot) and one space. - Then, click on Replace All and the job is almost done.
Finally, run the same task for sentences ending in exclamation (!) and question (?) marks to make sure you have picked up all your double spaces!
In iWork, this function may be most useful in Pages. But remember that it also works in other text editors and many other applications. For instance, in the Dictionary, the article on the word "put" is very long, but you only want to check the meaning of "put up".
In such a case, type Command + F and type in put up to see all the meanings.
Command + F works in most internet browsers. Many users just don't realize this. Suppose you searched for something in Google and found a long article on the subject.
To find the relevant passage in the article, press Command + F to open the search window (it's at the top in Safari and Chrome and at the bottom in Firefox), and then type what you are looking for.
The browser will give you the number of instances and guide you to the relevant word or phrase.
This function is also ideal for finding quotes in their context. If you have a quote or part of it, just copy and paste it into the Find window, and the computer will take you to the relevant passage. For example, to find out who said We
have
nothing
to
fear,
but
fear
itself, type it in the browser window and the Internet search will bring you a number of sites mentioning the quote. Go to the site that looks most trustworthy, press Command + F and type fear in the Search window. Then, click on arrows to go to the place where the original, slightly different quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt, The
only
thing
we
have
to
fear
is
fear
itself, is mentioned.