The book panel in InDesign is indispensable for working with long documents that are composed of multiple working files. The panel menu has commands for working with all the documents at once, so you can preflight, print, export, etc., with maximum efficiency. But one command you won’t find in the panel is Find/Change in all book documents. InDesign does give you the ability to run a Find/Change in all open documents.
But that won’t do you much good if your book is composed of dozens of files. But now, thanks to Peter Kahrel, there’s a script that lets you run a Find/Change on all documents in a book without opening them.
To use the script, you fill out the Find/Change window as normal, then run the script. In the dialog that appears, you can tell the script to run a Text or GREP Find/Change, and whether you want to change something or just locate it.
Documents where InDesign found what you were searching for are left open. Others are processed in the background and closed.
You can read more about the script and download it here. Thanks, Peter!
This article was last modified on June 26, 2025
This article was first published on February 12, 2025
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