A Fast Find-Next

Summary: Tired of the Find and Replace dialog box blocking the view of your worksheet when you are searching for information? Do what I do and get rid of the dialog box. Use the technique described in this tip to do your searching. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, Excel 2003, and Excel 2007.)

You already know how to find information in an Excel worksheet by using the searching features built into the program. Using the Find tool (press Ctrl+F) you can search for just about anything in your worksheet. I find myself using Find quite often in the course of editing a worksheet, particularly if the worksheet is quite large.

There is one thing about Find that bothers me, however. I hate having the Find and Replace dialog box block part of my worksheet as I am stepping through occurrences of a search string. Clicking on Find Next works great, but that bothersome dialog box is still blocking my view.

To overcome this, I generally do the following when I am searching for something:

Press Ctrl+F as normal, specifying what I want to search for and then looking for the first occurrence.
When the first occurrence is displayed, I press the Esc key (or click on Cancel). The Find and Replace dialog box disappears.
To find the next occurrence, I press Shift+F4.

This procedure works the same as clicking Find Next repeatedly, and it is just as fast, but it gets rid of the annoying Find dialog box.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2117) applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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