Keyboard shortcuts reassign themselves

Madeline, thanks for chiming in again!

Like you, I've gotten mostly used to having to click on the Replace tab, although it is irritating to have to do it.  Showing both Find and Replace at the same time allows one to do either, without mousing or track padding around to hit the Replace tab.  

At the same, though, I found the same thing you did-- the reassignment of keystrokes is more irritating.  

I've also found that there are times that I like the "new and improved" basic Find that shows each instance in the document.

Of course, worst of all in my situation is the intermittent crashing after invoking a Find, but I'm glad to hear that it's NOT happening to you!  It gives me hope!

Oh, and relevant to the original query… I have not had a key reassignment since I turned off Dictation in Preferences and quit Word and relaunched it.

Huh. Does that mean you'd had Dictation turned on? I have NEVER turned it on. I wonder if activating it and then deactivating it would solve that problem! I'll have to try. (Of course, I'm not sure the next time I'll be working on a file with a table in it...)

Madeline, thanks for chiming in again!

Like you, I've gotten mostly used to having to click on the Replace tab, although it is irritating to have to do it.  Showing both Find and Replace at the same time allows one to do either, without mousing or track padding around to hit the Replace tab.

At the same, though, I found the same thing you did-- the reassignment of keystrokes is more irritating.  

I've also found that there are times that I like the "new and improved" basic Find that shows each instance in the document.

Of course, worst of all in my situation is the intermittent crashing after invoking a Find, but I'm glad to hear that it's NOT happening to you!  It gives me hope!

Oh, and relevant to the original query… I have not had a key reassignment since I turned off Dictation in Preferences and quit Word and relaunched it.

Sorry for going AWOL. I did misunderstand Jim's post about the find/replace command -- I was really referring to crashing when pasting stuff, rather than the F/R thing.

I do have command-f assigned to Advanced Find/Replace and it works without crashing. I thought I had set it, once upon a time, to open up in replace mode, but it doesn't -- just find, so I have to click on the replace tab, which is a little inconvenient because most times I need it it's to replace stuff. But somehow that doesn't irritate me as much as other things. :)

Bob, thanks!  I'm using OX 10.8.5 and Command-F definitely can be used.

I've reassigned it to what in the menu is labeled "Advance Find and Replace".  In the Customize Keystroke dialog box, it's called 

"EditFindDialog"   (it's under Edit and under All Commands).

Plus, one exploring this further, I've discovered, Command-F is, by default, assigned to Find; that is, Edit-Find.

It opens up the left-hand sidebar--and lists all the results--which is a different implementation than what happens in TextEdit.

Of course, the real issue is why "Advance Find and Replace" intermittently crashes Word!  In other words, the keystroke works-- it brings up Word's traditional Find dialog box, but then sometimes fails when the search starts.

Re: "...doesn't Word already, out of the box, use Command-F?"

Prior to Office 2011, yes. My understanding is that Microsoft was 'persuaded' to concede that keystroke in order to comply with Apple's User Interface Guide which assigns Command+F to the OS X Find [aka, Search in Document] command. As I wrote, Apple has been confiscating keyboard combinations since the introduction of OS X 10.7 (Lion). Along with that, the Word feature formerly know as Find was re-dubbed Advanced Find & Replace [EditAdvancedFind] but no built-in keystroke was created for it.

I believe Command+F can be reassigned to EditAdvancedFind in 10.6.x but I'm not sure about later versions of OS X.

Another way to look at it is that Command+F still executes the Find command but the feature it calls is Apple's contrivance, not Word's long-standing traditional assignment.