When talking about any word-processing program or website, we use the term ‘navigation’ to refer to how you move from one part of a document or website to another. The slowest way is to scroll using your mouse wheel (at the centre of your mouse) or arrow keys or clicking on the scroll bar on the right side of the screen. You will probably use these methods a lot, but sometimes it is handy to be able to navigate to specific points in the document that may be many pages away from where you are at the time.

A good idea when you have used headings under the styles of Heading 1, 2, and 3 is to turn on the Navigation Pane. I mentioned this earlier under the ‘Show’ section of the View tab. Ticking the box for this will show the Navigation Pane to the left side of your document screen. If you have applied heading styles, all your headings will appear in this pane, and you can click on any one to take you directly to that part in the document.

While in the Navigation Pane, you can also use the search field at the top of the pane to search for any specific word from the document. If the word appears more than once, it will show all the instances under the Results part of the Navigation Pane. You will need to click on ‘Results’ to see all the instances. Again, clicking on each one will take you to that result. Note that the ‘Find’ command (Home tab right side) will open the ‘Results’ section of the Navigation Pane if you did not have it open. The key combination for ‘Find’ is Ctrl+F.

Clicking on ‘Pages’ in the Navigation Pane will show all the pages of the document. You can also navigate quickly to any page by scrolling through the small page views. Note that the ‘active’ section of the pane will be in bold (‘Headings’ or ‘Pages’ or ‘Results’).

You can ‘Bookmark’ any point in a document by going to Bookmark in the ‘Links’ section under the Insert tab. The field that pops up will require that you give the bookmark a name, which you can later find under the ‘Go To’ pop-up which can be found under the ‘Find’ menu or by pressing Ctrl+G. Note that this allows you to also go to a page, section, footnote and many other options. You will not need to use the Go To pop-up if you want to go back to where you were working in a document when it was last open. MS Word will show you its own ‘bookmark’ for this when you next re-open the document.

You can move around the text with some smart key shortcuts. Clicking Ctrl+→ takes you to the next word and vice-versa with the left arrow. The up and down keys combined with Ctrl will take you between paragraphs. Similarly, pressing Ctrl+Delete will delete the next word or tab space.

You can go to the beginning or end of a document by pressing Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End respectively.