Navigating Word Documents

When you first type a document, you might enter the rough draft all at once and edit the text later, or you might be the kind of writer who edits as you go. No matter how you write, you need to be able to move the insertion point around a Word document quickly, locating just the text you want. Often, you navigate through a Word document using these general practices:

• Use the four arrow keys to move the insertion point within the current editing area.

• Click the scrollbars to scroll through the display until you view the text you want.

• Click your mouse pointer anywhere inside the editing area to set the insertion point in that location.

• If you type more text than fits in the editing area, use the scrollbars; arrow keys; and PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl+Home, and Ctrl+End keys to scroll to the portions of text that you want to see.

Note

Any time you start Word and want to return to what you were doing in your previous session, open the document and press Shift+F5 to jump directly to your last edit. You then can pick up right where you left off.

To quickly navigate many pages in a document, press Ctrl+G (the shortcut for Edit, Go To) to display Figure 2.3's Find and Replace dialog box and enter a page number to jump to that page. The Find and Replace dialog box is great for jumping not only to specific page numbers, but also to specific text that you want to read or edit. You will learn more about the Find and Replace dialog box as well as how the task pane helps you search for text.

Figure 2.3 You can quickly jump to any place in your document.

Note

The navigation skills you learn here also apply to the other Office 2003 products. Excel, for example, has a similar Find and Replace dialog box.

Selecting Text

Earlier in this hour, you learned how to insert and delete individual characters; you will now learn how to select entire sections of text you can move or delete.

When you highlight (select) text, you can perform tasks on that selection. For example, you can select two sentences and underline them for emphasis. You can select text using your keyboard or mouse. Table 2.1 shows the mouse-selection operations.

Table 2.1. Word Makes Easy Work of Text Selection

To Select	Do This
Any text	Click the mouse on the first character of the text and drag the mouse to the last character. (Figure 2.4 shows a partial paragraph selection.)
A single word	Double-click anywhere on the word.
A sentence	Press Ctrl and click anywhere within the sentence.
A line	Click the white margin area at the left of the line.
A paragraph	Double-click the white margin area at the left of the paragraph, or triple-click anywhere inside the paragraph's text.
The entire document	Press Ctrl and click the white margin area at the left of the document's text.

Figure 2.4 Select a block of text to edit.

If you want to select different sections of text at the same time, press Ctrl before you select each section of text. By using Ctrl, you can select a sentence at the top of your document and one at the bottom at the same time and then apply a special format to both sentences at once. Hour 3, "Formatting with Word 2003," explains how to format text you select.

To select text with your keyboard, move the insertion point to the beginning of the selection, press the Shift key, and move the insertion point to the final selection character. Release the Shift key when you're finished selecting the text.

Note

You can press Ctrl+A to select your entire document.