For me, the Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts for the text editing commands “Use Selection for Find” and “Find Next” / “Find Previous” are a reflex by now. These shortcuts and the way the commands work are pretty consistent across all Mac OS X apps that allow text editing.

The exception, of course, is Microsoft Word.

It drove me nuts that it doesn’t work the same way there, and obviously Word is exactly where I edit a lot of text. To bring it in line with the other applications I created three AppleScripts that implement these commands and bound them to the standard shortcuts ⌘E, ⌘G and ⇧⌘G with FastScripts (which is out in a great new version 2.4 with more features available for free).

Use Selection for Find:

tell application "Microsoft Word"
    set mySelection to content of selection
    set myFind to find object of selection
    set content of myFind to mySelection
end tell

Find Next:

tell application "Microsoft Word"
    set myFind to find object of selection
    execute find myFind wrap find find continue with match forward
end tell

Find Previous:

tell application "Microsoft Word"
    set myFind to find object of selection
    execute find myFind wrap find find continue without match forward
end tell