Article 18:
Navigating a Word document --
and not for beginners only

There are many ways to navigate from the beginning to the end of a Word document. You probably have your favorites, using the mouse or the keyboard. But let’s look at the wide variety of choices that Word offers, and you’ll probably find some new ones that you never knew existed.

Let’s start with the basics: make sure you have a Word document of some length open as we do this; the instructions will be easier to follow.

Using the mouse

On the right side of your screen is a vertical scroll bar. (It has up and down arrows at either end, a gray area in the middle, and a scroll box that moves from one end to the other to reflect your position in the document.)

To scroll through your document, do the following:

Click the up arrow to scroll up one line.
Click the down arrow to scroll down one line.
Click above the scroll box to scroll up one full screen.
Click below the scroll box to scroll down one full screen.
Drag the scroll box to go to a specific page in your document.
If your mouse has a scrolling wheel, turn it to scroll quickly to any part of your document.

Now let’s use the keyboard

Somewhere on your keyboard, you have Page Up and Page Down buttons that do exactly what they say: by pressing them, you move by pages through your document.

Near these keys are the Home and End keys. These keys take you to the beginning or end of a line, respectively.

Next, while holding down the Control ( Ctrl ) key, press the Home key. Your cursor jumped to the beginning of the document. If you hold down the Ctrl + End keys at the same time, you reach the end of your document.

Now let’s get fancy:

I had a problem this week. I had a very large manuscript and I needed to locate and change every footnote reference in the main text. There were over 100 footnotes and I didn’t want to reread the entire document to find them. I needed a quick solution and I found one – Word’s Select Browse Object button. This feature allows me to navigate through my document not by pages or lines, but by document elements such as tables, graphics, footnotes, and more.

Where is it...

With your Word program open, locate the right scroll bar. Right beneath it, you will see a double arrow pointing up, a small circle, and a double arrow pointing down. Click the small circle.

The Select Browse Object grid with 10 small buttons appears. Run your mouse over them to see what each button stands for. Notice that in the first row, the third button from the left is the Browse by Footnote button -- just what I needed.

...and how does it work?

I clicked the Browse by Footnote button; immediately, the arrows above and below the button turned blue, indicating that a special Browse function was being used (instead of the default browse function, which is by Pages). Now, every time I clicked the Up or Down blue arrows, I was taken to the footnote above or below my current position of the document.

While I used the Browse by Footnote button, I could have equally used the Select Browse Object feature to find pictures, or tables, to do a search in my document, find text that had been formatted in a particular way, and much more. Try the different buttons and experiment…

Browsing with Edit > Go To

If you prefer working with menus, click Edit > Go To (shortcut: Ctrl + G). In the dialog box that opens, look at the objects listed in the left-hand box: Page, Section, Line, Bookmark, Comment, Footnote, Endnote, Field, Table, Graphic, Equation, Object, Heading. Click one that is familiar to you, and follow the instructions given to browse your document.

For instance, open a Word document that includes several pictures. Click Edit > Go To, and select Graphic in the list. In the blank box to the right of the list, type +2; the second graphic in your document appears on the screen.