A handy Microsoft Word trick
How to use view two parts of a document at once
I don’t use MS Word very much these days for writing. Generally I use WriteRoom, which offers the advantage of an uncluttered full-screen interface that cuts down on distraction. But my publisher’s bringing out a new edition of my book on Buddhism and vegetarianism, and using Word became a necessity. In fact I had the unpleasant task of taking a text file they sent me and turning it back into a fully-fledged Word doc. The unpleasant part was the the document had about 90 plain text endnotes, which I had to manually convert into Word endnotes. I had to copy text from the end of the document, create footnote markers in the relevant places, and then paste in the text. This required a lot of scrolling up and down the document.
Fortunately I remembered the “split window” trick, where you can view two different parts of the document at the same time. I was able to keep the plain text footnotes in one pane, and scroll down the body of the book in the other, adding the footnotes as I went.
This is what it looks like:
To get a document to behave like this, just go to “Window” (in the menu bar) and then select “Split.” When you want to get rid of the split window just go to “Window” and then “Remove split.”
6 Responses to “A handy Microsoft Word trick”
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Published: Apr 07 2009
Bummer, open office doesn’t have this. This could’ve saved me a headache last year.
I haven’t used Open Office for several years now. Even when I used Windows computers I was trying to move away from MS and gave it a whirl, but the spreadsheet program lacked some features I’d come to rely on in Excel. I’ll no doubt try it again at some point. Maybe I’ll find it’s improved.
If you make requests at their website, someone might make the improvement.
I’d do it, but I’m a bit lazy at the moment.
Thanks for the tip. I will definitely find a use for it at work. Cheers, s.
ah ha hah… Very fancy. I like it.