From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training
Using Find/Change - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training
Using Find/Change
- [Instructor] I have my magazine document open here from the exercise files, and I want to find a word. So let's open the edit menu and choose Find Change. Or you could press Command F or Ctrl F on Windows. Now, you can see there are a lot of features in the Find Change dialog box. So I'm just going to start with the basics here: Find what and Change to, up at the top. Let's say we want to search for the word "end." I'll just type that in here. Now, I'll click Find Next. InDesign finds the first instance in my document, but it's hiding, so let me move this out of the way and then I'll zoom in a little bit by pressing Command plus, or Control plus on Windows. Notice that I can zoom in and even edit this text while the Find Change dialog box is still open. That's really helpful. Now we can see that InDesign did in fact find the word "end," but inside of another word. That's not what I was intending. I just wanted to find the whole word "end." Fortunately, InDesign lets me change the scope of what it's searching for. For example, first we'll look inside the search popup menu. Right now, there are two options in here: Document, which means just this particular document, and All Documents, and that would search for the word "end" in all the documents that I currently have open. Sometimes if you already have text selected on your page, when you start Find Change, this search popup menu will change to Selection, which means InDesign will only search through the text that's currently selected. So that can be tricky. You always need to check the scope here. I can also change the scope with these buttons down here, but I need to be honest with you, it's hard for me to remember what all those little icons mean. So here's what I do. I move my cursor on top of them until I see a little tool tip show up. Like, this third one is "include hidden layers and hidden objects." This one over here is "case sensitive," so it'll match the upper and lowercase characters. And over here there's "whole word." That's the one I'm looking for. I only want to find the whole word "end." So I'm going to click on that button and try again. I'll click Find Next, and it jumps to the first instance. By the way, notice that you can also search forward or backward here. That is, if your cursor is in the middle of the story, like here, you can control which direction InDesign will search from the position of the cursor. Now, of course, Find What is only half the equation. Sometimes you want to find a word and change it to something else. For example, let's come up here and change Find What to two spaces. I just typed two spaces in that field. So we want to find everywhere that the author typed two spaces instead of one. You know, for these kinds of proportional fonts, you should only use one space after punctuation, right? And we're going to change those two spaces into a single space by typing one space in the Change To field. Oh, by the way, I should point out this little At symbol over to the right. Whenever you see an At symbol popup menu, it means special characters. So if you click on that, you can see all kinds of special characters, the invisible characters, the interesting glyphs and stuff like that. Things you may not know how to type. So we're not looking for any of those right now, but it's good to know about. Okay, now I'm going to click Change All and it says "two replacements made," but I happen to know there are more instances of double spaces in this document than that. What went wrong? Well, remember just a moment ago, we told InDesign what the scope of the search should be. We told InDesign to find only whole words. Well, double spaces aren't whole words, but it found something. Let's click okay. This time I'm going to turn off the whole words button and try again. Click Change All, and it found all of them that time. That's great, I'll click okay. Now, there are lots of other things you can do in the Find Change dialog box. For example, down here you can find text with particular formatting and change it to other formatting. I'm going to be covering that in a later chapter. You can also do this thing called Grep Find Change up here in the Grep tab. This is super helpful for finding complicated text patterns. If you're interested in Grep, check out the course called Introduction to Grep in InDesign here in the online training library. The Glyph tab of the Find Change dialog box lets you search for specific characters in your document. The Object tab lets you find and change object formatting. For example, you might want to change every frame that has a one point solid stroke into a two point dash stroke. You can do that with Object Formatting Find Change. And the last tab, Color, lets you find and replace colors throughout your file. I'll talk about that later on in the chapter on color. This Find Change dialog box is incredibly powerful when you take the time to dial in exactly what you're looking for and exactly what you want to change it to.
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