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My Pages is a long document that I use every day to record my communications, over 650 pages, and it won't search for words I know are there. What am I missing, does it have to be in document, section, or format? Or something else I don't know about?
There are no updates and the app otherwise is functioning alright.
Appreciate your help.
Mac mini, macOS 11.6
Have you told the Find tool to match on whole words or case as appropriate?
Occasionally, but in no particular pattern, you may search for a word that is in hyphenated form, and sometimes that text string will not be found until you click the > button on the Find/Replace panel. I just experienced Pages v11.2 immediately finding the text string in one example, and not in another, so it is not uniform behavior.
I have a sentence in the body text that contains the word kind. That word is in a table cell, and also in a rectangular shape. When I search for kind, there is no find count. But clicking the > arrow lights up all three instances of the word kind.
Have you told the Find tool to match on whole words or case as appropriate?
Occasionally, but in no particular pattern, you may search for a word that is in hyphenated form, and sometimes that text string will not be found until you click the > button on the Find/Replace panel. I just experienced Pages v11.2 immediately finding the text string in one example, and not in another, so it is not uniform behavior.
I have a sentence in the body text that contains the word kind. That word is in a table cell, and also in a rectangular shape. When I search for kind, there is no find count. But clicking the > arrow lights up all three instances of the word kind.
Ok. In the Find panel, there is a 🔍⌄. Click that and it will show you all of the previous find strings. The last item in that drop-down menu allows you to clear your previous find strings. Do that. Quit, and relaunch Pages.
I have reset my Find tool to just Find and Whole words, and no Match Case. I also have a sentence in Pages v11.2 that includes the hyphenation pre-Columbian. I can find the text strings pre, columbian, and pre-columbian. Find has no issue crossing section boundaries. However, if I have pre-Columbian in a table cell within the second section, Find returns two matches in the body text for both sections, but not in the table cell. It will only find the pre-Columbian string in that table cell after being bribed twice with the > on the Find panel.
Alas, this does not remedy the situation in my case (MacBook Pro, OS 12.2.1, Pages 11.2). I read of a similar issue from last Fall, which advised closing all open Pages documents, quitting Pages, restarting the Mac. I was hoping something less drastic wa available by now.
It is how the Pages team wrote (or bungled) the Find/Replace tool. Perhaps a future Pages update will resolve the current implementation issues. Pages v11.2 is now four months old…
Thanks for your response. I have it on Find only as I'm just looking for a piece I've written, and Whole Words.
Thanks for this. Really great to get it resolved. What causes this...what should I be doing to keep it functioning as it should?
Wanting to identify the number of places a word appears in an 11,000-word document, I have tried FIND according to the instructions below and I have had 0 success.
Submit your own main post, not as part of another person's post. You will get help faster that way.
Find will not search for a word in a Pages document
