Image above shows a magnifying glass over the “+f” part of “ctrl+f” (with the Mac command symbol included). On the right an example is shown from the Edit menu on a Mac, with the ⌘F shortcut highlighted in pink).
Ctrl+F (command+F aka ⌘+F on a Mac) is a vastly useful keyboard shorcut (the menu-based equivalent is Edit » Find) to quickly highlight and find instances of a word or phrase in any document online or otherwise.
I’ve written more about how to use it here (How to find text quickly on a web page or in a file) but if you’ve not used it before and you’re on a computer (as opposed to a phone) it’s probably quicker just to try it out yourself and search for the word document on this blog post.
Click and hold the Ctrl (or Command) key and then tap the letter F; it will bring up a search box. Type the first few letters of your search word and it will start to highlight instances on the page. Press enter to jump through to each highlighted instance.
Searching on an iPhone
There are different ways to search for a word or phrase on an iPhone and I’ve demonstrated a couple of them in this short video below. There may be other methods but I don’t know them, I also don’t know if this works with Android phones or other devices. I think iPads are probably the same as iPhones. Try it! Let me know @JoBrodie.
- The first method uses the Share » Find on Page option
- The second uses ‘replace link in address bar with the word you’re searching for’ option
For those of you trying out the search function on this page here’s another instance of the word document for you 🙂
How to do various techy things 