Navigating Around Long Documents

You learn something new every day. The other day on my forum a member asked, "I'm writing a novel in Microsoft Word and it's rather large, 250 pages so far, and I was wondering if there is a simpler way of finding simple pages rather than using the side scroll thing to scan the document..."

As you would expect on MWC, various members leapt in to try to help. However, the answer I found most interesting came from a member named Justin. He wrote: "Below the scrollbar on the right you will have a button in between two arrows. These two arrows allow you to scroll quickly and the button selects how you scroll. By pressing this button you can select to browse by page or chapter (section) as well as a whole other bunch of options. Check it out."

I must admit, I've used Word almost every day of my life for the last ten years, but I've never really looked into these scrolling options. Anyway, I decided to follow Justin's advice and check out the buttons concerned. Here is a screengrab of the bottom of the right-hand scrollbar in Word. You will see the two buttons with double arrows that move you quickly up or down the document, and the button in the middle that selects how you scroll.

If you click on the button in between the two double-arrows, the following box appears...

This box allows you to choose how you want the double-arrow buttons to work. As you hover your cursor over each of the icons, the message in the box below changes to describe what that particular button does (e.g. 'Browse by Heading').

By default, the double-arrow buttons allow you to move up or down through your document one page at a time. But by clicking on the appropriate icon in the box above, you can elect to browse by section, by heading, by graphic, by table, and more. You can also choose the 'Go To' option to go directly to a particular page number. Just remember to click on the button again once you are finished and choose 'Browse by Page' to return to the default setting.

If, like many writers, you regularly find yourself working on long documents, using these controls should make it much quicker and easier to navigate them. I can see myself using these features quite regularly in future, so thanks a lot for the tip, Justin!