THE SEARCH FUNCTION

USABLE ON WORD, WEBSITES AND MORE

When you open a website or a document, sometimes all you care about is a small section. For example you might be on our website looking up what workshops we have planned in the future, but your current priority is learning more about your iPhone.

Instead of scrolling down and checking every event, let your computer find it for you with the find command. Pressing CTRL + F on Windows or COMMAND + F on Mac will bring down a little drop box near the top of the screen (highlighted in red below). This is where you can type in your search query and your computer will find all the words that match.

Let’s find all the iPhone workshops that we’re running. Simple type ‘iPhone’ into the box that popped up and we can see below that the word ‘iPhone’ appears twice on the web page. The search function immediately scrolls down for you and highlights where the word appears. From this we can see there’s one ‘iPhone and iPad Fundamentals’ workshop being held on the 17th December.

If there’s a lot of results you can press the left and right arrows next to where you typed in ‘iPhone’ and it will cycle through all of the results, highlight and showing you them.

SMART TIPS TO MAKE FINDING EASIER

• Don’t be too specific: The find command will search for EXACTLY what you type in including punctuation (ignoring capitalisation). Searching for ‘iPhone workshops’ which will show up no results. Try to stick to one word.
• Don’t try and find common words: Trying to search for ‘at’ will show you all the results with ‘at’ in it. This could be cat, attention or even thermostat.
• This works for Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, File Explorer and many more: The find command works for any program or document that I’m aware of. It’s stranger when it doesn’t work so use it to your advantage! Try it on this email to search for ‘workshop’
• The more you use it, the easier it gets: At first you may be unsure of what word to search for to get the best results but the more you search the better you’ll get at it. Practise makes perfect.