Look at a Document in a New Way

When I’m working on a long document in Office XP’s Word, I often like to quickly review various sections—such as places where I made recent changes in the text, entered footnotes, graphics, or created tables. When I checked out those funny-looking symbols in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, I discovered they were browsing functions, but I never could quite figure out how they work. Can you help?

You’re right on both counts: Those buttons (see screenshot at right) are a bit mysterious, and they can help you browse.

Speaking of browsing, you should know that if you press Shift+F5, Word will take you back to the last place you worked on an open document. If you press it again, it will take you back another step and even a third step. Word will remember those places even if you close the document and then return to it.

But back to those little buttons. Press the small up-pointing double-arrow button and it will move the document back one page at a time. The down arrows likewise move pages down. Each click on the large down-pointing single arrow will move a page down by a small increment. But if you press and hold that button, the document will roll down slowly. Now look way above those four icons at the top of the column (which by the way is called the Vertical Scroll bar), and you’ll see a large up-pointing single arrow.

But the really interesting function is the little ball in the middle of the double-arrow sets, called the Object Browser. Pass your cursor over it and a message appears (see screenshot above) instructing you to press Alt+Ctrl+Home (a left-click works just as well) to access 12 more icons (see screenshot below). As you pass your cursor over each icon, a screen will identify its function. Some are searching functions, such as Go To (for jumping to any page in the document), Find (functions the same as the Find that Ctrl+F will evoke when you’re in a document).

The rest are browser functions: Browse by Edits (each click will take you to the last editorial change), by Heading, by Graphic, by Table, by Field, by Endnote, by Footnote, by Comment, by Section and by Page.

Happy browsing.