PageFour Help - Searching

All search options are available from the main Search menu, or via the shortcut keys. Open the search menu and select Find Folder or Page, or use the Ctrl+G shortcut combination. The Search panel will open at the bottom of the PageFour screen.

Standard search options, such as Whole Word and Case Sensitive need little explanation. As the names suggest, they apply filtering criteria to the searching process, insisting that the text you search for features as a whole word in the folder and page title, and that the upper and lower case characters are identical. These are switched off by default, and only necessary if you expect your search to return a large number of results.

The name of the page or folder should be entered into the Look for drop down list. This need not be a complete name, as partial matches will also be returned. For example, if you are looking for all pages with 'Gandalf' in the title anywhere in your PageFour notebooks, you might enter 'Gandalf' or 'gand'. The results are likely to be identical.

The Search in drop down list gives you two choices: searching in the currently open notebook (the default), or searching across all notebooks. As we do not know where the pages relating to the new Lord of the Rings ending are, the best option is to choose All Notebooks.

The search returns 3 results, each with enough information to quickly jog your memory. A list of every page or folder containing the search value in the title is displayed beneath the search panel. Double clicking on any entry will immediately open the page for viewing in the word processor. Looking at the example above, the most likely contender for the page containing the alternate ending would be 'Sauron kills Gandalf' in the Silly Ideas notebook.

But what if the page did not have such an obvious name? What if, in a burst of creativity, we had scribbled down the new ending at the end of a long treatise on fourteenth century taxation systems in Northern Italy. How would we find it then?

PageFour's searching differs from that of other word processors in that it allows for searching not just in the currently open page, but across all pages within its scope. This means that if you have 15 or 20 notebooks, each filled with folders and pages, PageFour will search every page in these notebooks and folders for the text you are looking for. The results are then displayed in a list for you to open and browse at your leisure.

Clicking on the Search button or pressing Ctrl+F will open the Search panel.

The most basic search is simply a case of typing in the text you wish to find, pressing the Find button to search the current page, and using the F3 shortcut key to keep searching the page for each occurrence of the text. Clicking on the >> button in the panel will present more advanced options such as where you wish to search, which direction to search in, whether case is important and does the text need to be a complete word or is a partial word permitted.

The only additional action required when searching for text across notebooks is to select either Current Notebook or All Notebooks from the Search in drop down list. If the scope of the search includes any pages that are password protected, PageFour will prompt you to enter your password before the search begins. Cancelling out of the password dialog will not cancel the search, it will simply exclude any password protected pages from the search.

In the example above, we searched for 'gandalf' across all notebooks, and a number of results were returned. The results list tells us clearly which pages in which folders and notebooks contain the word 'gandalf.' Double clicking on any one of these results will immediately open the page in the word processor and select the first occurrence of the search value. Searching out every instance of the search value on the open page is then simply a case of using the F3 (Find Next) shortcut key.

A point worth noting is that the search list is only ever overwritten when another search across notebooks is carried out. This means that you can perform an intensive notebook search, spend some time examining and working with the results (even searching for other values within the open page), without needing to rerun the initial search.

The Replace Text panel (Ctrl+H) allows you to enter the text to find and also the text to replace it with. Again, there are advanced options to determine how to carry out the search, along with a Replace All button which will change every occurrence of the text in the entire page. If you do not Replace All, you will be given the option every time a word is found to replace or not.

The Replace All has not been implemented for entire notebooks, as it was decided that such an option would be far too dangerous. The possibility of inadvertently damaging all your pages - by replacing the word 'the' with 'and' for example, was too great.