Navigate long Word and Excel documents

Fast forward
In documents that are not heavily structured with sections and sub-headings, document maps are not particularly useful as navigational aids, so Word’s Find function can be a better bet. To use it, click on the Edit menu and select Find, then type the word you’re looking for and press the Enter key.

The cursor jumps to the next occurrence of the search term, and with each subsequent press of the Enter key it finds another occurrence until it reaches the end of the document.

A better way of using the Find feature is with the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl and F. Because this automatically places the cursor in the ‘Find what?’ panel of the Find and Replace dialogue box, it is possible to press Ctrl and F and then immediately type the term to be searched for, followed by Enter.

In this way, a search can be conducted without having to look away from the screen or take your hands from the keyboard. However, you will need to interrupt your typing if you wish to conduct an advanced search using the additional features of the Find and Replace dialogue box, which are revealed by clicking the More button and activated by placing a tick next to the appropriate options.

A wildcard search, for example, lets you find all forms of a word by using an asterisk to represent missing letters; so typing ‘writ*’ would find ‘writ’, ‘write’, ‘writers’ and ‘writing’, for example. Such open-ended searches can be useful when you can’t remember exactly what you typed.

The use of wildcards is subtly different from the ‘Find all word forms’ option, which finds both ‘gone’ and ‘went’ when ‘go’ is searched for, or the ‘Sounds like’ option, which can find words that may have been misspelled: not just common howlers such as ‘seperate’ and ‘neccesary’, but even outlandish mistakes such as ‘cistem’ for ‘system’.

The Format and Special buttons in the Find dialogue box are not particularly useful as navigational aids, but it’s worth remembering where they are and what they do. They enable you to locate text with particular formatting characteristics, and to search for the special formatting marks that Word uses in its documents, both of which can be great timesavers when struggling to edit documents created by other people.

Going places
The GoTo command is on Word’s Edit menu and can be summoned by the easy-to-remember shortcut of Ctrl and G. Unlike the Find function, which searches for text within a document, GoTo searches for a specific region such as a line, section or page number.

In addition, GoTo can search for bookmarks. Like their real-world counterparts, these are place markers to which a writer might wish to return. To create one, place the cursor at the point you wish to define (you may optionally wish to highlight some text) and then open the Insert menu and click Bookmark. Type a name for the bookmark and click the Add button or press the Enter key.

To jump to a previously defined bookmark, press Ctrl and G and type the name of the bookmark (or pick it from the dropdown list) before pressing the Enter key. Bookmarks are invaluable because they allow the user to jump to a point where there are no specific words for which the Find function might be used.

For example, you might wish to place a bookmark called ‘Intro’ in the introductory paragraph of a document. Even though the word ‘Intro’ does not appear in this paragraph, it becomes possible to jump to this point from anywhere in the document by using the GoTo command.