Navigate long Word and Excel documents

Previously we looked at simple ways of moving around and finding information in Word and Excel documents so you can get things done more quickly. If you missed this, catch up here.

This issue we look at some of the advanced navigation techniques available to anybody wishing to produce longer and more complex Office documents - though many of the techniques will also be of use when working with everyday material.

To make things stand out in Word, it’s so easy to apply formatting to specific words or paragraphs by changing a font or adding bold, italics and underlining that it’s easy to forget the existence of styles. These are used to impart consistency to a document by ensuring that each paragraph has a look and feel appropriate to its place within the document.

By applying a recognisable visual style to every chapter, section or topic heading, you make it easier for readers to understand how a document is organised and how to find the information they need. Even more importantly, the use of styles makes it easier for the writer to maintain a grip on the document’s structure and to generate a document map, which is a sort of interactive index.

If each paragraph in a long Word document has a style applied to it (this is a simple matter of clicking in an appropriate paragraph and then selecting a style from the formatting toolbar), it is possible to create an instant map of the document in which each style-tagged paragraph is listed down the left-hand side of the screen. Clicking on an entry in this list jumps to the relevant position in the main document on the right of the screen.

To see this in action, open a document that already contains styles. If you don’t have one, open any long document, click on each topic heading in turn and apply the ‘Heading 1’ style from the formatting toolbar. Once this has been done, click on the View menu and select Document Map. It takes next to no time for a map based on the document headings to be created and displayed in a separate panel on the left of the screen.

The map and the source document can both be scrolled, but as soon as you click on any item in the document map on the left of the screen, the focus of the main document jumps immediately to the corresponding section. Apply the Heading 2 style to a line and it appears as a sub-heading in the Document Map, and so on with Heading 3.

A document map is as useful to the reader as it is to the author, provided the reader knows about document mapping and remembers to turn it on, but for documents destined to end up in print the equivalent feature is a table of contents inserted near the beginning of the document.

In effect this is a printed document map, generated in an identical manner from embedded styles, but instead of providing a clickable means of moving through a document, it lists the pages on which each heading can be found. The contents tools identify any text set in a heading style as a new section to include in the list.

To create a table of contents, place the cursor at the point in the document where you wish the table to be inserted. On the Insert menu, click Reference and then select Index and Tables. This displays the Index and Tables dialogue box, in which there is a tab labelled Table of Contents. Clicking this displays several options relating to the physical appearance of the table, but to insert one in the default format all you need do is click OK.