Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Finding and Replacing

When editing a document, sometimes you know exactly what you want to revise, but just don’t know where it is. For instance, you want to go back and reread the paragraph you wrote about mansions, but you don’t remember what page it’s on. Or suppose you’ve found out that you misspelled Sarah’s name all the way through an article. Now you have to replace every occurrence of Sara with Sarah—but how do you make sure that you’ve got them all?

That’s where “Find and Replace” comes in.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: Back to Where You Once Belonged

The Go Back command is unique to Microsoft Word, and it’s fantastically useful. No matter where you are in a document, this command scrolls directly back to the last place you clicked (usually the last place you edited text)—even if it was in another open document.

You’ll find this command useful in a number of circumstances: after splitting and unsplitting the window, and then finding yourself deposited in the wrong part of a document; when you’ve just opened up a document that you were editing yesterday and want to return to the spot where you stopped; when reconsidering an edit after scrolling to a new location; and so on.

Better yet, Word doesn’t just remember the last place you clicked; it remembers the last three places. Each time you use the Go Back command, your insertion point jumps among these four places—the last three edits and your current position—even if that means bringing different document windows forward.

You can trigger ...