Unleash the Power of Word’s Search Box

The Story:

“New Release!” is probably one of the scariest phrases technical writers might ever hear in their entire career, given all the repercussions of change behind that phrase. Once you hear those two words, all sorts of change ideas start spinning in your head.

“Do I have to update that user’s guide that gave me a hard time to come up with in the first place??!” ...
“I hope this time they have a clear document with all the program changes for a change!”

“Do I really have to take those screenshots again??....it took me a whole day to set up the environment for those screenshots??!”.

If you’ve been there, you probably know that creating a user’s guide from scratch is perhaps a lot easier than having to update an old one.


Recently, my company decided to move one of its major products from Oracle forms to Java which brought about a complete face-lift to the program interface. The functionality and navigation scenarios will probably remain the same, but the look and feel of the GUI will change beyond recognition!

As you know, you can’t give your software a nose job and leave the user’s guide not updated. And so, I had to estimate the effort for retaking all the screenshots in a 250 page user’s manual. With that huge number of pages, by the time I manually counted the snapshots in my guide to estimate the effort, the developers will have already released the new system (metaphorically speaking). There had to be some other way to count the snapshots automatically…..and then it hit me!.....Word’s search box.


The Resolution:

Now I have used Word’s search box before to locate multiple instances of the same word or to make global changes in a document with a couple of clicks, but it never occurred to me I could use the box to count the number of images in my document. This sounded like real “automation” to me.

I guess it was that “Special” button that I usually ignored while running a search in Word. I clicked that button, & it was like I opened a whole new world of search capabilities.

Now what I needed to do is to figure out how many images there were in my 250 page document:


1- On the Find and Replace box, I clicked More to expand the search options.





2- On the Special list, I selected Graphic…after all, a snapshot can be called “graphic” :-D.



3- To get a graphic count, I needed to highlight all instances. So on the Reading Highlight list, I selected Highlight All.




4- And VOA LA!!.....there I had it!…a count of all images in my document!




Now knowing that a technical writer can take around 40 snapshots a day, I could easily tell how many man days are needed to update the user's guide.

The bottom line is: using the “Special” list on Word’s search box, you can easily automate several counting, finding, and replacing procedures that would have otherwise been tedious tasks.