Using Find/Change for text formatting

I showed you the Find/Change feature in an earlier chapter, but I focused just on finding and changing text throughout your document, or even across multiple documents. Now I want to take it farther, and talk about adding text formatting to the mix. For example, I have my catalog document open here, and I am going to zoom in on the lower left corner here, and I can see that I have various prerequisites, and technical requirements. I would like to format that text, but it would be really tiresome to have to go in there, and select each one of those lines in every course in this catalog, and have to change it.

No; there's got to be a better way, and of course, there is. I will double-click on this text to switch the Type tool, and I'm going to select that word, Prerequisites. I am going to copy it to the clipboard with a Command+C or Control+C, and I'm going to bring up my Find/Change dialog box with Command+F or Control+F. Now, in the text pane of the Find/Change dialog box, I am going to paste what I just copied into the Find What field with a Command+V or Control+V. I did that copy and paste only because I didn't want to have to type that text myself. So I want to find that word, with a colon after it, and then I want to apply formatting to that word.

How would I do that? Well, I can do that by changing the Find Format and Change Format fields at the bottom of the dialog box. If you don't see those fields, then you need to click on the More Options button. For example, I will click on Fewer Options, and you'll see they disappear. Click on More Options, and they reappear. You want to have those visible; those are really powerful fields that we are going to be talking about here. I am going to click on the Change Format field, just anywhere in this blank space, and up comes a Change Format Settings dialog box, which lets me specify exactly what I want this text to look like.

I am going to click on the Basic Character Formats pane, and I will type in what font I want this to be, instead of what it is now. I will change it to Myriad Pro. I only have to type M, Y, and it guesses Myriad Pro for me. Then I'll hit Tab, and type B, O. Now in this case, I don't want it to be Bold Condensed; I just want Bold, so I better pull that right out of this pop-up menu. There we go; Bold. There is no way to make Bold Condensed go to Bold just with keyboard shortcuts, unfortunately.

And finally, I am going to change the size make it a little bit bigger; maybe 10.5 points, instead of the 9.5. And you know, why don't I change the color too? I will click on the Character Color pane over here, and pick a color that might look nice; maybe this blue color. Looks good. I will click OK, and you can see that all of that formatting is listed here in the Change Format area. It's tempting to go right for Change All button, but before I do that, I have to remember that I made a selection on my page. I did that when I copied that word, Prerequisites.

So I need to change the search pop-up menu from Selection to story, because I only wanted the Story. I could choose Documents, or All Documents, which means every document that's open right now, but in this case, I'm just going to say Story. Now I am ready to go. I will click Change All, and you can see that it went through and changed 14 of these. Click OK, and now I will see the change. I will move the Find/Change dialog box out of the way, and you can see that it changed it throughout the story. Let's do the same thing to this Technical Requirements text as well.

I will select that, copy it, come up here, paste it, change the Selection to Story, and click Change All, and then you see, very quickly, it goes through and changes all of those as well. Let's do a couple more of these while we are at it. What if my art director tells me that I want all of these to be a different color instead? Well, in this case, I want to delete the text out of Find what. When the Find what and Change to fields are blank, then it's only going to find and change the formatting. So in this case, I'm going to click in the Find format, and say I want to look for anything that's that particular color, and then I want to change it to something else.

I will click and change Format, I will click on Basic Character Formats, and you can see that I can actually just delete the text out of here. When I delete that, it means, don't pay attention to those of all; don't apply formatting to those things. I am just going to change the character color itself. Maybe I will pick this orange instead. Once again, the Find format and Change format fields show me exactly what's going to be found, and what's going to be changed. I will click Change All, and it changed all of them.

Two more things to look out for inside the Fine/Change dialog box. First is, whenever you do apply some formatting in Find or Change, you will get that little eye icon; that means that search format, or change format exists. It's just a little alert that says, watch out; there is something selected down below. If you wanted to clear out that formatting, then you click on the little trashcan in the lower right corner of each of these fields. When you click on that, it simply strips away all the formatting, and leaves it blank. Consistency and efficiency; that's what it's all about. Changing text formatting with Find/Change ensures consistency throughout your document, and there is hardly anything more efficient than this feature.