This tip falls in the category of “wow, that’s easy to do, I wish I would have known about it long ago!”
When you are on a particularly long web page and need to find a term or phrase, click on Edit from your menus, then Find (or Find in page on some browsers). The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + F. You will be presented with a small window that allows you to enter a word or phrase and then the computer will look for that word on the page and bring you right to it.
As with many other features, Mozilla Firefox’s implementation of this feature is superior to all other browsers, as it gives you helpful extras like find the next or previous occurrence of the word or phrase you are looking for and even has an option to highlight all the occurrences on the page.
This tip is especially helpful for genealogy researchers. Sometimes your eyes can become crossed looking for a surname in a sea of text. Use the find function instead and cut your work and eye strain in half!
If you need to look for the same term again on the same page, you will notice that the function gives you the option to find again without retyping.
This type of search works best with single words, but you can experiment with phrases as well.
You can also use the Find function in Word Processing documents, email, spreadsheets, and PDF files as well.
Watch the short video below to see this tip in action in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.
