Display Two Or More Documents On One Screen

A. It’s not only possible, it’s easy to do. In fact, you can display pages of more than two different documents. However, as you shall see, there are limits to its usefulness unless you have a very large monitor.

But before going into detail, let’s review the more commonly used split-screen function, which can display two separate pages of the same document. There are three ways to evoke it: by clicking Window, Split ; by evoking the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+S or by using the super shortcut, in which you place your cursor in the upper right corner of the screen on top of the vertical scroll bar and pull down the split box.

When the pointer changes to , drag the split bar to the position you want. Pull down the bar and you now have two separate screens. Now you can work independently in each simply by placing your cursor in either one and clicking. The screen of this original document looks like this:

Screen one.

Screen two.

Now, back to your question—how to display screens of more than one document on a single screen. First, your screen must be set to the Print Layout mode ( View, Print Layout , or click on the third button from the left on the bottom scroll bar).

Then select View, Zoom , and the following screen will appear.

Be sure the Many pages: button is engaged. Note that you can change the size of the screen images by adjusting the scroll arrows in the Percent: box. Of course, if the image size is too small you cannot read the words on the screen; at best, you can view the layout of the text. But once you increase the size, which then limits how many pages you can show on the screen, you’ll be able to read the text and fully edit it.

To select how many pages you want to view, click on the monitor icon and then click and drag to increase the pages, much as you would when creating a table in Word.

Once you’ve tried this, you may want to step up to a 21-inch monitor.