15 Keyboard Shortcuts for Fast Navigation in MS Word

When you're editing a long document in Microsoft Word, you can waste a lot of time if you don’t know how to quickly find where you need to start working. I'll show you quick ways to navigate a Word document that will help you get more out of your small business software and get to work faster.

A Word Doc from Top to Bottom

When you want to move from the top of a document to the bottom of the document, press Control + End or Control + Home. These keystrokes move the insertion point to the space immediately after the last character in the document or immediately in front of the first one.

To move from cell-to-cell in a table use the Tab key. Use Shift + Tab to move backward. (Click for larger image).

To move page-by-page through a document, press Control + Page Up or Control + Page Down. While this moves you one physical document page at a time, pressing Page Up or Page Down will moves one screen at a time.

Efficient Editing in Microsoft Word

When editing a Word document, you can move from one end of a line to the other using the Home and End keys. To move one word at a time, press Control + Left Arrow or Control + Right Arrow. This is a quicker and more efficient way of moving into position for editing text than moving one character at a time using the arrow keys.

Navigating Tables in Microsoft Word

You can bookmark places in a document, and then find them easily using the Word Bookmark feature. (Click for larger image).

When you're working inside a table, press the Tab key to move from one cell to the next across a row and then to the next row. You can use Shift + Tab to snake backward through the table cells.

Pressing the Alt key with the Page Up, Page Down, Home and End keys moves you to the top or bottom cell in the current column -- or to the first and last cell in the current row.

Navigating Columns in Word

You won’t find many keyboard shortcuts to help move around easily within newspaper style columns in Word. To move from one column to the next, press Alt + Page Up or Alt + Page Down -- these keys take you to the very top of the previous or the next column. If you need to go to a particular place within a column, clicking with the mouse is the better option.

Special Key Combination

When you close a Word document, the software notes the last place you were working. When you reopen the document you can return to that place immediately by pressing Shift + F5. This same Shift + F5 key combination will rotate you through the last places you worked in the document.