Word Processing

Unit 3: Advanced Word Processing Techniques

Lesson 9: Navigating the Word Processor More Effectively

How do you find text and navigate quickly around your document?

As the length of your documents grow the ability to find text and navigate quickly around in your documents becomes more important.

Finding Text

With the Find command you can search all or part of your document for a word or a portion of a word. You may also use special wildcard search patterns that allow you to search for specific patterns with arbitrary characters in certain positions.

In order to understand how the Find command might be used, consider the following example. Suppose you have just written the first 12 pages of a short story about a boy and his dog Shep. As you develop the character of the boy, it occurs to you he is more of a cat person. You wonder what the impact to your story will be so you use the Find command to find all references to Shep.

To find all occurances of Shep in your document:

Place the insertion point at the beginning of your document. (The Find command works forward from the current position of the insertion point.)
Choose the Find... command from the Edit menu. This will bring up the Find dialog box.
Enter the word Shep in the dialog box, and click on the More button, to display more options. Choose match case. (You can also choose other format options to specify your search even more.)
Click on the Find Next button to find each occurance of the word Shep in your document.

Variations on the use of the Find command include:

If you check the option in the Find dialog box it will locate only whole words that match the text you have entered. For example, if you didn't check this field, searching for the word bag would also locate words like rutabaga and bagel.
If you check theoption, the capitalization of each letter must match exactly. For example, if you don't check this field, searching for the proper name Mark would also find the verb mark.
Wildcard searching. A "?" in the search string you specify indicates any character can match. For example, if you wanted to search for all occurances of the word conductor in your document, but aren't sure you spelled it correctly in all places, you could enter conduct?r as your search string. This will find words like conductor, conducter, conductZr, etc.
Finding special characters. If you are really into this lesson, you might be asking yourself, "If ? can be used to find any character, what if I want to find a '?'?" The answer is you can search for special characters such as "?," tab, and paragraph markers, but you have to enter the code that corresponds to the character into the dialog box. For example, to find a "?" enter ^?. To find a tab character enter ^t.
Searching a selected region. If you only wanted to search a certain portion of your document, highlight or select that portion before choosing the Find command.

Navigating Your Document

There are several ways of moving quickly around in your document. One of the most useful tools is the scrollbar. By grabbing and moving the scrollbar up and down you can quickly move to a relative postion in your document. Other methods include:

The navigation buttons in the lower righthand corner of your document: take you one page backward/forward in your document.
The button allows you to browse by subject. Click on it and drag through the list: to browse by footnote, graphic, section, etc.
Keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+End will take you to the end of your document. Ctrl+Home will take you to the beginning. Page Up, Page Down, and the arrow keys can also be used to move through your document.