A Fast Find-Next

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:

1. Press Ctrl+F as normal, specifying what I want to search for and then looking for the first occurrence.
2. When the first occurrence is displayed, I press the Esc key (or click on Cancel). The Find and Replace dialog box disappears.
3. 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.