Navigating Through a Word Document
Word offers an enormous number of ways to move through a document, and most people can increase their productivity by learning some of the shortcuts.
You needn't memorize dozens of key combinations or obscure mouse tricks to boost your productivity. Rather, if you concentrate on reducing the effort you expend on the two or three navigational techniques you use most, your productivity will soar, and the amount of time invested is negligible.
Not all the best navigation tricks are well known, either. Some of them aren't even documented. Instead of merely throwing lists of shortcuts at you, you'll learn some tricks for memorizing the most important ones.
Using the Keyboard to Move Through a Document
Aside from the obvious up-, down-, left-, and right arrows, the most useful keyboard shortcuts for navigating around a document are listed in Table 15.1.
Most experienced Word users would benefit from memorizing three groups of shortcut keys from those in Table 15.1, and they're all based on the Ctrl key. Here are the combinations, and the way the Ctrl key changes the keys you're probably accustomed to:
Ctrl+Home/Ctrl+End go to the beginning/end of the document (instead of beginning/end of line)
Ctrl+Left/Right Arrow move by words (instead of characters)
Ctrl+Up/Down Arrow move by paragraphs (instead of lines)
Tip from 
Possibly the most useful, but obscure key combination in Word is Shift+F5. Word keeps track of the last three locations where you edited text. Pressing Shift+F5 cycles through those three locations. When you open a document, if you want to return to the last location you were editing, press Shift+F5.
WOPR XP/2002, at http://www.quehelp.com, contains a sophisticated program called QuickMarks that enables you to quickly set and return to navigation points that you define in a document by using your number pad.
→ To find out more about this WOPR XP/2002 utility, see Appendix B, "What's on Que's WOPR XP/2002 Pack".
Using the Mouse to Move Through a Document
Word follows most of the standard Windows mouse navigation techniques, with a few interesting twists, as described in Table 15.2.
| To Scroll | Do This… |
|---|---|
| Up one screen | Click above the scrolling box |
| Down one screen | Click below the scrolling box |
| To a specific page | Drag the scrolling box and watch for page number |
| In Normal view, scroll | Press Shift+Left Arrow Left, into the margin |
If you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, such as the Microsoft IntelliMouse, many additional mouse navigation options are available.
Navigating with the Document Map
By far the most powerful way to navigate through a long document with the mouse is via Word's Document Map. After several false starts, Microsoft has finally made DocMap reliable. It's particularly valuable for advanced Word users who have to navigate through moderately long documents (say, five or more pages).
The Document Map is a "hot" outline of the document's contents—similar to a Table of Contents—which appears in a pane to the left of the document itself. If you take a little care in applying heading styles, the entire structure of your document appears in DocMap, and each important point is directly accessible.
Because the DocMap table is "hot," you can click a heading—"Chapter 7," for example—and the document immediately jumps to the beginning of Chapter 7. Click the heading "Sales Goals for 2003" in the DocMap pane, and Word jumps to that location in the document.
Word constructs the Document Map based on outline levels in each paragraph. If you stick to the standard Word heading styles—Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on—the outline levels are automatically applied by Word (level 1, level 2, and so on). If you use your own styles, they can have whatever outline level you want to apply.
→ For more details on styles, see "Formatting Documents with Styles".
→ Outline level is part of paragraph formatting. For details on setting the outline level and what it entails, see "Adjusting Paragraph Alignment and Outline Level".
Using the Keyboard and Mouse to Select Text
In general, Word parallels the rest of Office in methods for selecting blocks of text. The wonders of Extend mode, however, remain unique to Word.
→ Think you know all there is to selecting text? Think again…and while you're at it, see "Selecting Text".
Word allows you to select multiple, noncontiguous blocks of text. Hold down the Ctrl key as you drag across the text you want to select, or double- or triple-click as you would with a single selection.
Tip from 
You can change one single selected block of text without deselecting everything. Hold down the Ctrl key and click once inside a previously selected block. That specific selection, and only that selection, is deselected.
In addition, Word enables you to extend the selection:
Click once at the beginning of the text block you want to select.
Click again at the end of the text block you want to select. If you make a mistake, continue clicking until you get it right.
Double-click the EXT again, or press Esc, to leave Extend mode.
This technique can be particularly useful if you need to select large blocks of text. Although you can always click and drag across the text you want to select, Word frequently scrolls pages by so quickly that it's hard to stop. Use Extend mode or Shift+Click to scroll at your own pace.
Tip from 
You can even use Word's Find feature while in Extend mode. To select everything from the insertion point to the next occurrence of the word "Corporation," for example, double-click EXT, click Edit, Find, type Corporation, and click Find Next. The selection is extended automatically for you.
Word has one additional keyboard-related method for selecting text that doesn't have a parallel in any other Office application: the F8 key.
Press the F8 key once, and Word goes into Extend mode. Press it a second time to select the current word. Press it a third time and you select the current sentence. Press it a fourth time, and you highlight the current paragraph. Finally, press it a fifth time and you select the whole document.
Conversely, at any point in the F8 expansion process, you can press Shift+F8 to shrink one level: If a paragraph is selected and you press Shift+F8, the selection shrinks to a sentence.
Tip from 
F8 has one more trick up its sleeve. Say you want to select all the text from the current insertion point location up to and including a specific letter. Press F8, and then that letter. To extend the selection from the insertion point to the next r in the document, for example, press F8+r.
Bookmarks
In the real world, a bookmark is a piece of paper that marks a location in a document. In Word's world, a bookmark is a selection—a piece of text, a picture, or just an insertion point—with a name.
Bookmarks come in handy in two different situations:
They provide a location to which you can navigate. For example, you can put a bookmark in a document called "StartOfChapter17." Then you can tell Word "go to the bookmark called StartOfChapter17" and you're transported to that location. Similarly, you can use bookmarks as the destination for hyperlinks setting up a link, say, to the bookmark called TermsAndConditions in the document c:My DocumentsContract.doc.
Word provides several tools for retrieving the text covered by a bookmark. For example, if you put a bookmark called CustomerName over the name of a customer in a contract, you can sprinkle {REF CustomerName} fields throughout the contract, and everywhere the field appears, that customer's name will show up.
→ To learn more about Word's {Ref} and {PageRef} fields, see "Referring to Document Contents".
To set a bookmark, do the following:
Select the text you want to have bookmarked, or click in your document in the location you want to bookmark.
Choose Insert, Bookmark. The Bookmark dialog box appears (see Figure 15.1).
Figure 15.1. Bookmarks can cover text, pictures, paragraph marks, and almost anything else in a document—or they can be as small as an insertion point.
Type a bookmark name. Names must start with a letter and can include letters, numbers, or the underscore character (_), but not spaces.
Word has a woefully inadequate method for displaying bookmarks (which are usually invisible). Click Tools, Options, click the View tab, and check the Bookmarks box. Word displays bookmarks as [ ] brackets surrounding the bookmarked text.
If you're wondering why you're having trouble making heads or tails of your bookmarks after you've chosen to view them, see "Which Bookmark Is Which" in the "Troubleshooting" section at the end of this chapter.
If you move a block of text that includes a bookmark, the bookmark goes along. If you delete a block of text that includes a bookmark, the bookmark is deleted. If you copy a block of text that includes a bookmark, however, the bookmark stays put.
Word has no built-in method for renaming bookmarks. You must use the Bookmark dialog box to first delete the old bookmark name, and then establish a new bookmark with the required name.
Be careful when adding or deleting text near a bookmark. Text that's typed at the beginning of a bookmark is added to the bookmark. Text that's typed at the end is not added.
Navigating Through Documents with the Object Browser
In the lower-right corner of the Word window—down below the vertical scrollbar's down arrow—you'll find a remarkable collection of three buttons known as the Object Browser.
Word's Object Browser has absolutely nothing in common with Visual Basic for Applications'Object Browser. The latter is a real Object Browser. The former is a marketing buzzword.
The Word Object Browser generally works best if you use it this way:
Click the circle in the middle (the Select Browse Object button) and tell Word what you want to look for. You can have Word cycle through all the pictures in a document, for example.
Click the double-down arrow to search toward the end of the document for the next occurrence (say, the next picture). Click the double-up arrow to search toward the beginning of the document. Of course, after you've selected the type of object you want to use for browsing, you can skip trying to hit these undersized buttons and use the keyboard shortcuts instead: Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down.
You can search for the following "objects":
Fields— Word moves from field to field, although it skips hidden fields (such as {XE} , the field that creates entries for a document's index).
→ To learn how you can empower your documents with fields, see "Using Fields Intelligently".
Endnotes— Word jumps from endnote to endnote. If you start in the body of the document, Word stops at each reference to an endnote, in the main part of the document. If you start in an endnote, Word cycles through each of the endnotes.
Footnotes— Similarly, if you start in the body of the document, Word goes from footnote reference to footnote reference. If you start inside a footnote, the footnotes themselves are selected.
Comments— Surprisingly, Comments don't work the same way. If you position the insertion point inside a Comment (for example, by choosing View, Comments), and you scroll down, you'll go to the next Comment. But if you scroll up, you'll end up in the body of the document, at the reference point for the preceding Comment.
Sections— Word moves from the beginning of one document section to the next.
→ Ever used sections before? Many Word users haven't, at least knowingly. See "Page/Section Setup Options".
Go To— As shown in Figure 15.2, Go To includes most of the options in the Object Browser (Fields, Endnotes, Footnotes, Comments, Sections, Pages, Heading, Graphic, Table), plus Line, Bookmark, Equation, and a confusingly named "Object" option, which goes to the next OLE Object.
Figure 15.2. Go To lets you navigate to absolute locations such as "Page 137," relative locations such as "120 lines down from here," bookmarks, and the like. The Go To options are accessible both from the Object Browser and by choosing Edit, Go To.
The easiest way to jump to each of the bookmarks in a document is to click the Select Browse Object circle, and then click Go To (or choose Edit, Go To). In the Go to What box, select Bookmark. Click the Go To button. From that point on, each time you click the Object Browser's double-up arrow or double-down arrow (or press F5), you'll go to the next bookmark in the document.
Find— Same as choosing Edit, Find from the menu bar. Find is discussed at length in the next section.
After you've set up a Find or Replace, the easiest way to repeat the Find or Replace is to clear the dialog box away and use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Page Down (or Ctrl+Page Up to search backward).
Edits— Word automatically keeps track of the last three locations in the document where you've made changes. This setting lets you cycle among the three edits (the same as the Shift+F5 keyboard shortcut).
Headings— Cycles to the beginning of each paragraph in the document that is formatted with a "Heading n" style, where "n" is any integer between 1 and 9.
Graphics— Moves to the next picture in the document (whether linked or embedded), or the next Drawing Canvas, but ignores pictures and Drawing Canvases in the drawing layer.
Tables— Cycles through all the Word tables in the document. (That is, tables created by the Table menu or the Tables and Borders toolbar.)
→ To learn more about which objects are stored in the drawing layer, see "Working with the Drawing Layer".