Tip – Microsoft Word Keyboard Shortcut to Find the Next Instance of Text You’ve Already Looked For

16 January 2009 Posted by Eyal Sela in category: self efficiency with Tags ,

office word iconWhen you are working on a document and need to find text (a specific word or phrase), pressing CTRL + F pops up the “find” dialog box and lets you search for that text. Now, let’s say you found it and kept working on that document, and now you want to find the same text again. Pressing CTRL + PageDown will instantly take you to the next instance of that text! No need to open the “find” dialog box again (Keep CTRL down and press PageDown to move to the following instances of that text).

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6 Responses to “Tip – Microsoft Word Keyboard Shortcut to Find the Next Instance of Text You’ve Already Looked For”

  1. anand babu 2 August 2010 at 8:46 am (PERMALINK)

    This post is very useful and handy.
    Thank you Eyal Sela,

    Regards
    anand

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  2. Name 4 August 2011 at 7:29 am (PERMALINK)

    Very useful tip. Thank you for sharing it with us.
    :-) :-) :-)

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  3. Name 11 August 2011 at 9:46 am (PERMALINK)

    On Mac OS X, use cmd + PageDown.
    Also, ctrl/cmd + PageUp finds the previous instance.

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  4. Name 15 August 2011 at 6:10 pm (PERMALINK)

    The rest of the bloody world, INCLUDING Microsoft uses “F3″ for find Next, but in Word we gotta do “CTRL-PGDN”, wtf?! Is a little bloody consistancy really THAT much to ask?!

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  5. MCAB 30 November 2011 at 5:20 pm (PERMALINK)

    According to Microsoft documentation Ctrl + PageUp / PageDown in fact does “Move to the previous browse object” / “Move to the next browse object”. You may find it does not work as Find Next/Previous depending on your browse settings.
    Alt Ctrl Y or Shift F4 are I believe more reliable as Find Next.
    Alternatively, for those who like consistency, you can set Shift F3 to do Find Next via the Customize Keyboard shortcuts feature, (see button at bottom of Customize Ribbon in Options).

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