Anyone who has used Microsoft Word down the years will be familiar with the keyboard combination Ctrl-F to bring up a search box. Well, all that’s changed in Word 2010. Hitting Ctrl-F now brings up the Navigation pane on the left which is a little different, but I think an improvement – at least once you’ve tried it for a day or two.
So how is it an improvement? Well for me, one annoyance of search and replace in earlier versions of Word was the way the search box would jump around over the document when you clicked the Find Next button often obscuring the search results. Now in Word 2010, the search box is in the Navigation pane in the left panel. Search results are highlighted in the main window as you type your search word. If there are few enough occurrences, a snippet of text containing the words is displayed in the Navigation pane. Clicking on a particular snippet will take you to its location in the document and the words remain highlighted. The Navigation pane can be docked and undocked if you wish by clicking the down arrow to the right of the word Navigation. The pane can also be closed by clicking the cross next to the down arrow.
I was sceptical at first. Is this really an improvement? Well it’s not obscuring the search results any more but it doesn’t seem to be case-sensitive – searching for Table brings up Table and table and words like adjustable which end in table.
No problem. There’s a drop-down box which you can access by clicking the down arrow at the right end of the search box. Select Options here.
Now if you like, you can select Match case and Find whole words only to improve your search results – and if you like you can make this your default search option by clicking the Set As Default button. Incidentally, you can also select Advanced Find (the old style search box) from this drop-down menu.
Okay, so you’ve tried it and you still don’t like the new Navigation pane. Well, you can try remapping the Ctrl-F key combination to the old style search box, now called Advanced Find. I’m indebted to Jay Freedman for instructions on how to do this:
- Right-click the ribbon or Quick Access Toolbar and choose Customize the Ribbon.
- Click the Keyboard shortcut Customize button in the dialog.
- Select the Home Tab category.
- Select the EditFind command.
- Click in the “Press new shortcut key” box and press Ctrl+F (note that the “Currently assigned to” label shows that you’re taking the shortcut away from the NavPaneSearch command, which is what you’d change to if you ever want to restore the default.)
- Click the Assign button and then click Close.
I’ve also discovered another quick way to access this Advanced Find box by adding its icon to the Quick Access Toolbar at the top of your screen. Follow my instructions in an earlier post on the Quick Access Toolbar, but this time you want to go to All Commands and scroll down to Advanced Find (with the binoculars icon), highlight it, then click Add to add this to your Quick Access Toolbar. Now when you click the binoculars icon on the Quick Access Toolbar, as shown in the top screen shot above, the familiar old style search box should appear.
Finally, I should point out that clicking Ctrl-H to bring up the good old Find and Replace box hasn’t changed in Word 2010 – and you can also access Advanced Find by clicking the Find tab at the top of that box. Of course Replace still has that old annoyance of obscuring results just like the old style Find did.
So give searching with the new Word 2010 Navigation pane a good try out first before you revert to old habits… if you must – I think you’ll like it.
The new search feature (Ctrl-F) in Word 2010 is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.
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January 19th, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Thanks for this! I hit it on a Google search and it was just exactly what I needed to do: remap the shortcut so it worked like the old Word that my muscle memory still knows.
A tip: if you clear the dialog box and then hit Ctrl-PgDn, it repeats the search without calling the dialog box. Knowledge of this shortcut changed my life!
I didn’t actually object to the Search pane in the left-hand margin; I objected to the way it made my document shift back and forth.
January 21st, 2011 at 1:46 pm
That’s a great tip which I didn’t know about! Lets you move down through the search results very easily. Thanks for that Karen.
March 8th, 2011 at 8:11 am
This article is very helpful, thanks.
March 9th, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Thanks for this.
One step at a time, I am restoring Word 2010 to usability.
May 2nd, 2011 at 2:31 pm
when we hit ctrl-f in a 15-page word document, the new navigation pane on the left takes a minute to open. Any idea why it takes to so long to open?
May 16th, 2011 at 11:26 pm
Thank you times a billion! The Ctrl+F window is a huge part of my life and I don’t like the nav pane for finding and replacing. I’m not sure if that is sad or what but yeah!
July 30th, 2011 at 12:39 am
can any body tell me that do we have a option similar to that in pdf where you can do advance search….like search for a content in several files….is the same option there in word 2010. IF ANYBODY CAN HELP ME OUT IT WOULD BE A GREAT HELP.
August 7th, 2011 at 2:44 pm
@Karan, if you turn off incremental find in the find options it will not move the view on you (I hate that too.)
August 8th, 2011 at 3:13 pm
There are some commercial tools that can assist you in multiple find and replace in multiple doc and word files and here are few links
http://www.technocomsolutions.com/advancefindreplacehelp.htm
September 7th, 2011 at 3:34 pm
Thanks for the instructions on how to remap the Ctrl+F shortcut so it worked like the old Word! My searches usually are complex (search for underlined words, find and replace the ^p with something else, etc.). That nav pane was a pain and I don’t mind the having the advanced serch box jump out of the way when finding a term.
September 19th, 2011 at 7:22 am
I need to search selected column in a Table. FIND used to search in selection by default & now does in Advanced. But I would like to do it using the Navigation Pane in 2011. Can’t find a way to search in selection with results shown in Navigation Pane? Ideas???
October 4th, 2011 at 10:36 pm
I do everything from the keyboard. With the old search, I hit my keyboard shortcut, got the search dialog box, entered the string, hit return (which located the first occurrence of the string), hit esc (which closed the dialog box), and then hit a new keyboard shortcut to go to each subsequent occurrence of the word.
Now I cannot just hit return to reach the first occurrence of the string. I have to do some tabbing or some such. INFURIATING!
How to get back to the earlier form of search? I use it constantly to navigate around documents and loathe having to use additional keystrokes. Thank you.
December 15th, 2011 at 12:46 am
Thanks!!! Just what I was looking for.
January 19th, 2012 at 5:11 pm
This NavSearch in Word2010 was starting to annoy me and thats when I found your tip – very helpful. Cheers
January 27th, 2012 at 1:42 pm
Some good commercial tools are available which help in Find and replace words in Multiple files.
http://www.lantechsoft.com/advance-find-replace.html