Continuing on from my last post on the Navigation Pane, another example of some of the work done for Word 2010 is the new default Find experience. This is again a feature built in support of the "Polished User Experiences" vision pillar described in Scott's Framing the Release post.
Find is not a new feature, and has been in Word for a long, long time. As a user, you hit Ctrl+F, and a little dialog pops up. You type the word you're looking for, and hit ENTER. As you continue hitting ENTER or pressing Find Next, you scroll through your document, stopping at each match in the content. Occasionally,
Discount Office 2007, the little dialog changes screen location, so that it's not sitting on top of the range of the document that you're trying to look at. It works, but it could certainly be more polished and integrated…
New Find Experience Also in the Navigation Pane, in Word 2010 we have a new, more seamless and integrated flavor of the Find feature. Rather than a modeless dialog box that jumps about on the screen to get out of the way, the basic Find experience now sits conveniently at the top of the navigation pane.
[Note that the old find dialog is not completely gone, and is still available by clicking the dropdown at the right-hand edge of the search box. Two primary reasons it is still around are 1) the new find does not yet support every advanced feature of the old find dialog, and 2) the navigation pane does not have any Replace functionality.]
So, what is the new Find user experience?
Just type in the "Search Document" box at the top of the navigation pane to start (Ctrl+F will put focus in the box, and show the navigation pane if necessary) As you type… All matches within the document highlight yellow, and Word will scroll the document to the first match (and continues to scroll as you refine the term). If you cancel the search or hit escape, you return to where you were. If you're on the headings tab of the navigation pane, any tab corresponding to a heading whose content contains the term you searched for is highlighted yellow If you're on the pages tab of the pane, the thumbnails for the pages that don't contain the search term are filtered out, leaving you with just the list of pages that have what you're looking for If you're on the search results tab, you'll see the list of matches with a small snippet of context. Again, this list grows and shrinks as you refine your search Hitting Enter is the equivalent of clicking Find Next, which actually commits you to the location of the next search hit and selects it (just as it always has). Hit enter again to go to the next match. Clicking on the arrows for Previous or Next Search Result do what you'd expect, searching up or down as appropriate. The dropdown menu to the right of the search box also offers many of the popular object types you might want to search for, including graphics, tables, equations, footnotes/endnotes, and comments (by author). Example Suppose I want to search for "navigate" within my last blog post document. I hit Ctrl+F and start typing. As I type, Word is busy searching, as described above. By the time I've typed the first seven letters, and have "navigat" in the box, here is what I'd see:
Here is what I would see in each of the three tabs of the pane:
At this point it's matching all manner of words that start with those letters,
Windows 7 Home Premium, but as I continue typing and get to "navigate", the result set is much smaller (one match, in fact):
Again, each of the three views in the navigation pane:
A couple of things to notice:
It scrolled ahead automatically so I can see this first (and only) instance of the word "navigate" Because the word appears in the content that is under the heading "Rearranging and moving content", that heading is highlighted in the navigation pane The page list is filtered so that now the only thumbnail is has is that of page 3 – if you look close, you can even see the yellow highlight on that page And of course the results list now just has the one match. At this point, I can either just start editing in the document if I've found the thing I'm looking for, or I could hit ESC (or click the X) to return to where I was, or hit ENTER to actually select that first instance of the match. Note that in terms of keyboarding, there is essentially no change here even though the UI is very different. For example, in both Word 2007 and 2010 the end-state of the following steps is identical: Ctrl+F, type a word to search for, press enter (however many times), press escape. In both cases focus is in the document, and the word is selected. Similarly, if I press escape prior to hitting enter, I find myself right where I was before hitting Ctrl+F (even though in the new Find experience in 2010,
Office 2007 Key, I may have temporarily been looking elsewhere).
Conclusion And that's my brief overview of the new Find UX in Word 2010. I left out some details,
Purchase Office 2007, such as the fact that you can turn on or off the incremental search mode, and in the search options you can change settings such as match case,
Office 2010 Key, whole word only, etc.
There are a lot of things I'm really excited about adding here in the future. For example, we don't [yet] support all of the things you might want to find, such as Revisions. And we don't yet support Replace through the new UI. But what we do have so far for is pretty amazing to use, I hope you think so too.
Again, thanks for reading. Any comments or questions are welcome!
--Scott Walker, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft Word
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Office 2007 Key The New Find Experience
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