From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Using Find/Change for text formatting - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Using Find/Change for text formatting

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- [Instructor] I showed you the find change feature back in an earlier chapter, but I focused just on finding, and changing text throughout your document or even across multiple documents. Now I want to take it farther. I want to talk about adding text formatting to the mix. For example, here I have my magazine document open, and my designer told me, I need to format every instance of the word Portland a certain way, but it would be really tiresome to have to go in there, and find every one of them, and then change the formatting one at a time. So of course, we want to use our friend the Find Change dialog box by going to the edit menu and choosing Find Change. Or you can press command or control + F. Now, here in the text tab of the Find Change Dialogue box, I want to type what I'm looking for in the find what field. I'll just type Portland. So we're going to find everywhere that that word shows up. Now we want to apply formatting to it by changing the find format, and the change format fields down here at the bottom of the dialog box. If you don't see those for some reason, you might not have more options turned on. So you can turn that on here. To use this, just click anywhere inside the change format field, and up comes the change format settings dialog box, and this lets you specify exactly what you want the text to look like. In this case, I'll click on basic character formats. I'll come over to the font style, and I'll just type MED, and it guesses I want Medium. Note that you can leave all these other fields blank. InDesign will just ignore those or leave your check boxes with a dash in them. Again, that just means ignore it. Let's go ahead and change the color too by clicking on character color in the list on the left, and I'll apply, say this blue color. Great. I'll click okay. And you can see that all that formatting is shown up down here in a list. Now, let's click change all. InDesign found 12 of them much faster than I could have done this manually, but now, what if the art director tells me, "We shouldn't use this color on any text, we should use a different color instead." In that case, you want to delete the text in the find what field. When the find what field is blank, then it's going to ignore it. It's only going to find, and change the formatting. The text itself won't matter. So any blue text will change. Let's go ahead and click down here in the blank area of find format. I'll head over to my character color, and I'll say I want to find any blue text. Then we'll click okay, and click down in the change format area. I'll head back to basic character formats, and I'm going to delete the word medium because remember, if it's blank, InDesign will ignore it. Finally, I'll head back to character color, and change this from blue to some other color. Maybe this rose color. Then I'll click okay. So once again, the find format, and the change format fields show me exactly what's going to be found, and how it's going to be changed. So I'll go ahead and click change all. 12 more instances changed. Oh, I also want to point out that whenever you apply some formatting in the find format or the change format areas, then you're going to get this little i icon up here next to the Find what or the Change yo fields. The i looks almost like an information sign, but the i icon is actually a little alert that simply means that some formatting has been applied to either find what or change to. If you want to clear that out, all you need to do is click the little trash can down here next to Find format or Change format. So now you can see, they're blank and the i icon goes away. Using Find change is one way to apply this kind of formatting, but I should mention that InDesign has much more advanced features that can do this kind of formatting automatically, such as nested styles, and grep Styles, I cover those in my title here in the online training library called, InDesign Secrets.

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