Feature of the Week: Navigation Pane in Microsoft Word 2010

Did you notice that whenever you press "CTRL + F" in Microsoft Word 2010, a pane would appear on the left side of the screen? We call it the navigation pane and in this article, I will discuss some of the neat things that you can do with it.

The navigation pane can be useful tool especially when you are working with long documents. Instead of hitting the page up and page down keys on your keyboard or flipping through pages using the scroll wheel on your mouse to go from one section of your document to another you can use the navigation pane to browse your document either by headings, pages, and search results.

The navigation pane is not just for browsing your documents – you can also use it to manage the structure of your document.

Have you been in a situation wherein you have to rearrange the contents of your document? (E.g. Heading X needs to go after Heading A; Subheading B should be under Heading Y not Heading A) Usually what you will do is to cut/copy the whole section of your document and paste it to where it should really be. This can be messy at times especially if you miss out something in your cut / copy and paste.

Now try this – use the navigation pane to rearrange your headings. Click the leftmost tab of the navigation pane (Browse the headings in your document) and you will see an outline of your document based on your headings. In the example below, we moved "Heading C" between "Heading A" and "Heading B"



If you need to create another heading between "Heading C" and "Heading B", you can right-click "Heading C" and select "New Heading After". If you want to insert a subheading under a certain heading, you can right click the heading and select "New Subheading".

Just like our headings, you can also move subheadings around your document just by click and drag including moving a subheading from one heading to another. Just as what happened in the example below where we moved a subheading so that it appears below "Heading A"



Now rearranging your documents is now as easy as click and drag – no more wasting time copying, pasting, and messing up your document.