Navigation Shortcuts for MS Word
Here’s the picture: you’re working on the ultimate document, it’s a masterpiece! Too bad the masterpiece is also a nightmare. It’s easily the longest document you’ve ever edited and the navigation through all those pages is a huge headache. (Not to mention the back and forth, back and forth between the keyboard and the mouse.) Help!
Never fear, help is on the way. While these shortcuts won’t make your document shorter, they will help to ease the pain as you try to navigate—hopefully without the need for aspirin.
Let’s begin with some basic keyboard shortcuts:
- Arrow keys = moves one space or line in the arrow direction.
- Ctrl + Left or Right arrow = moves the cursor one word left or right.
- Home = moves the cursor to the beginning of the current line.
- Ctrl + Home = moves the cursor to the top of the document.
- End = moves the cursor to the end of the current line.
- Ctrl + End = moves the cursor to the bottom of the document.
- Page Up = moves the cursor up the length of one screen.
- Page Down = moves the cursor down the length of one screen.
- Ctrl + Page Up = moves the cursor to the previous page in your document.
- Ctrl + Page Down = moves the cursor to the next page down in your document.
Now here are a few tidbits for document navigation with the mouse on the vertical scroll bar.
The first and easiest is to realize that when you click and hold on the scroll box a text box will appear which tells you what page you’re scrolling to and the section title which begins the page. This is really helpful in a very long document—it keeps you from playing the guessing game about where you are with the scroll button. (It cuts down on the “Oops! I went too far” problem.)
Below the scroll bar, you’ll find a series of three buttons. See them?
These little gems can be extremely useful.
The top and bottom buttons (double up and down arrows) are for moving one object up or down. Notice, I used the word “object” and not page. No, it’s not a slip of the tongue, or in this case the fingers.
The middle button (the dot) is called the Select Browse Object button. It allows you to select what items or objects the double up and down arrows jump to. For example, if you set the button to Graphic, the up and down arrows will jump from graphic to graphic regardless of how many pages are between each graphic.
To see your choices click on the Select Browse Object button. You should see a small palette of choices appear.
Select something from the palette that will aid you with your editing. The name of the icon will appear in the gray box along the bottom as you run the mouse pointer over each icon. (I tend to use either Browse by Page or Browse by Section but you need to choose whatever will help you the most.)
Once you’ve made a choice the up and down arrows are immediately ready to jump from object to object with the word object now being defined by the item you chose.
Keep in mind that you can change this setting whenever you wish, so put it to good use.
Well, there’s a pretty good list of items to learn. Give them a try—they’re such small things that add up to a lot of saved time when used regularly. I don’t know about you but I’m always looking to save time!
~ April