Are you an author who writes using Microsoft Word? Do you find yourself spending too much time scrolling up and down searching for particular sections of text?
If so, let me show you how a simple tweak can save you valuable time, and probably also reduce that achy mouse hand that you might be suffering from.
Navigating within a Word document
I am guessing you are already familiar with using the ‘find’ function within Microsoft Word, but just in case you are not, I will start there.
Open a Microsoft Word document, hold down the ctrl button on your keyboard, and at the same time hit the f button. This should open the navigation pane for you, which should look like this:
If you put a word or phrase into the search box, you will be able to move through all available occurrences of this word within your document, which can be very useful during both the writing and editing stages of working on a manuscript.
However, there is also the headings option in this navigation box, and if you are not currently making use of styles, then you are probably missing out on the joys of this wonderful tool.
Once you start using styles to label the parts of your word document, you will be able to jump quickly and easily between the different sections and chapters of your manuscript. Let me show you how.
How to label a chapter title as a heading in styles
If you have the home tab open inside your Microsoft Word doc, you should see the styles section towards the right side. It looks like this:
Assuming you are using a basic word doc, and not a template, your default is probably set to normal. Meaning that all of the text inside the doc will be labelled as normal, unless you state otherwise.
However, if we want to get the most out of the funky navigation option, we need to set our chapter titles as headings. To do that, simply use your mouse to highlight the title of a chapter in the document, and then click on Heading 1 in the styles part of your tool bar.
Once you do this, you should notice two things. Firstly, the appearance of your title will change to match the style shown in your toolbar. In the image above we can see that mine is currently set to size 16 blue text in the Calibri font. So, when I clicked Heading 1, my title changed to look like this:
Don’t worry about the appearance for now. I am going to write another post soon which shows you how to adjust the font of the headings. So, keep an eye out for that.
The thing we care about right now is that this heading will now magically appear in the navigation section of the document, like this:
What this means for you, is that instead of painfully scrolling between chapters, you can just open the navigation pane and then click on a heading to jump directly to that part of the document. It makes it so much easier to navigate within a large document, and can save a lot of time during both the writing and editing stages of your work.
It can also make life easier at the formatting stage, because if you decide that you don’t like the appearance of your headings, you only need to change the details in one specific place, and all of the headings throughout the document will be instantly updated to the new format. To find out how to do exactly that, read this post here.
I hope you found that useful. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!
V.A. Editing 