This InDesign tip on making Find/Change settings stick was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on July 14, 2017.
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Find/Change is one of the most powerful (and often overlooked) features in InDesign. For this reason, we devoted an InDesign Magazine feature article to Find/Change a few issues back to give it some love.
But Find/Change does have a few quirks. One of them is the fact that the scope of the search doesn’t always stay the way you set it. For example, if you only want to perform a Find/Change on the current story, you can choose Story from the Search pop-up menu.
But as soon as you click outside a text frame with any tool, the Search setting defaults to Document.
I suppose InDesign is trying to be helpful because there is no current story when you click away. Still, I wish the setting would stay the way I left it and buttons like Find Next, Change, etc. just got grayed out until I clicked in another story.
At least there’s a simple fix. Just press Ctrl/Command+F to close the Find/Change window before clicking outside of the text frame. Then the next time you open Find/Change it will be ready to just search the current story.
This article was last modified on July 25, 2019
This article was first published on July 18, 2017
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