I think it would be very helpful to be able to select an area, and find-and-replace within that area, rather than throughout each entire page. For example, I'm working on a project which requires one set of objects on one side of the page, and a corresponding set with lower values on the other side. Find-and-replace would be very handy, except that it would screw up the first set if I tried to apply it to the second.
Yes, it is disabled in Draw & Impress for some reason.. the same with regular expressions and search by format.
As recommended for the other find & replace tickets I recommend to improve the navigator rather than introducing new dialogs or special features. But the use case for this request should be taken into consideration.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 90558 ***
Sorry for the noise. Selection (of objects) is not the same as a selection in Writer.
There's a check-box under options, but after selecting a group of groups, it's still grayed out.
"Current selection only" has the tooltip "Searches only the selected text or cells" and applies to Writer/Calc. It makes sense to enable this checkbox in Draw an run the F&R only on selected objects. (Sorry for the delayed response, sometimes topics get left behind.)