This InDesign tip on finding without the Find/Change dialog box was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on September 6, 2018.
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InDesign’s Find/Change dialog box has always weirded me out. It simply doesn’t behave like most other things in the user interface. Panels are the things that can be left open all the time and docked together. Other dialog boxes must be closed before you can move on. And windows, well, you know what windows are. But Find/Change doesn’t neatly fit into any of those categories. In that way, it reminds me of the scene in the movie Stand By Me where the kids try to figure out what kind of animal Goofy is.
Regardless of where you come down on the nature of Goofy and Find/Change, here’s a cool trick that allows you to repeat the last used find/change operation with a keyboard shortcut. Just press Command+Option+F/Ctrl+Alt+F to trigger the Find Next command. This works even if Find/Change is not open. Don’t bother trying to do that with any other dialog box!
Even cooler: InDesign remembers the direction you last used, and will search forward or backward with the same keyboard shortcut.
Note that there are other shortcuts to invoke Change To and Change To/Find Next.
This article was last modified on July 25, 2019
This article was first published on September 12, 2018
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