On 11/7/10, THDW wrote:

>On 7 Nov 2010, at 18:00, Robert B. Waltz wrote:
>
>>It's still worth reading Joe Kissell's _The Nisus Way_. The syntax of Power Find has changed, unfortunately, but the concepts haven't changed at all.
>>
>
>Bob
>
>I really can't be bothered to invest time in learning Power Find when I scarcely use it.
>
>I write fiction and there is rarely a call for high-power find and replace. And I know that I can count on the kindness of listers.

Well, but by that argument politicians shouldn't bother to learn how to tell the truth when lying works so well.... :-(

There is some strength to your argument, and it's why I don't argue for learning Power Find Pro, which is arcane. But learning plain old Power Find is no harder than learning how to create (say) a hanging indent. And once you learn it, it can be amazingly useful.

I'll give you an example where it can be very useful to a fiction writer. Suppose you have two characters, and and you, without thinking about it, name one John Doe and the other John Eod. Later you realize that you need them to meet each other, and you'll have John talking to John and you can't tell them apart with "John said," "John answered," etc. One of them needs a new name. So you have to go through changing SOME but not ALL instances of "John" to "George" or "Jane" or whatever you turn John Eod into. Power Find could make this much, much, much easier.

If Power Find were hard, I'd grant the case. But you can find everything you need on the menus. That's why the learning curve is so small.

I can't make you learn it, and it's not something I'm going to waste any blood pressure over. :-) But I would urge you to give it a try. If you aren't going to use Power Find or any of NisusWriter's other special tools, you truly might as well use MS Word -- the interchange with other people's copies of Word is so much easier....

-- 
Bob Waltz
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"The one thing we learn from history --
   is that no one ever learns from history."