A Fast Find-Next

You already know how to find information in an Excel worksheet by using the searching features built into the program. Using the Find option from the Edit menu, you can search for just about anything in your worksheet. I find myself using Find quite often in the course of editing a worksheet, particularly if the worksheet is quite large.

There is one thing about Find that bothers me, however. I hate having the Find dialog box block part of my worksheet as I am stepping through occurrences of a search string. Clicking on Find Next works great, but that bothersome dialog box is still blocking my view.

To overcome this, I generally do the following when I am searching for something:

1. Use the Find option from the Edit menu as normal, specifying what I want to search for and then looking for the first occurrence.
2. When the first occurrence is displayed, I press the Esc key (or click on Cancel). The Find dialog box disappears.
3. To find the next occurrence, I press Shift+F4.

This procedure works the same as clicking Find Next repeatedly, and it is just as fast, but it gets rid of the annoying Find dialog box.