How to use the Navigation Pane in Word 2010

One of the most welcome improvements to Word in the Office 2010 edition is the navigation pane.  It gives Word a new, consolidated navigation/organization/search functionality very much like an Acrobat document with live replacement, selection and move features native to an editable document.  To take maximum advantage of the navigation pane, your documents should be formatted with Heading styles.

The screenshot below shows a Word document formatted with heading styles with the navigation pane turned on (click the View tab and place a check in the Navigation Pane box).  You will find this feature so useful that you will want to add it to your quick access tool bar (right-click on the Navigation Pane command on the ribbon and select "Add to Quick Access toolbar").

The pane has three tabs:  1) Headings; 2) Pages; and 3) Search Results views.

1) The Headings tab looks something like Acrobat bookmarks, and in fact convert to PDF bookmarks when "Create bookmarks using Headings" is selected when saving a Word 2010 document as a PDF (File > Save Y Send > Create PDF/XPS Document > Create PDF/SPX > Options > Create bookmarks using: Headings).  They behave like them too in the sense that you can jump around your document by clicking the headings.  But it gets better than that.  By clicking a heading so that it is selected, and then right-clicking it again, a context sensitive menu will pop-up allowing several very useful manipulations:

Furthermore, the headings can be drug around the pane and the corresponding text in the documents move with them.  This is a fantastic time saver when reorganizing a document that you have typed without the overall scheme of things in the first place, but that develops later.  You can create these blocks of text and you can move into place with a very simple drag and drop.  No more Ctrl-X, hunt for the spot, Ctrl-V; or split the window, or any of those other Word kluges.

2) Pages View is exactly like Acrobat thumbnail view, except (as might seem odd at first) you cannot drag pages about to reorganize the document as you can with headings.  It's a difference between reorganizing a finished artifact, where in a PDF document each page is itw own artifact, and the living nature of a Word document.  Makes sense if you think about it.  What is really nice about the page view tab is the way it works in concert with a document search.  Type your search term in the search box and each instance of the term will be highlighted in the document and in the thumbnail.  Then you can use the up-down navigation arrows in the Navigation Pane to jump from instance to instance.

3) The Search Results tab shows your results in context, which is extremely useful.  The up-down arrows jump from instance to instance.  Clicking a particular instance will jump to that part of the document.

The drop-down at the end of the Search box reveals many interesting options.  For instance, the ability to search on graphics, tables, equations. footnotes/endnotes, or reviewer comments.

My favorite is the Replace command.  Not only can I search and replace on a term in a single command, I can change the style or font or other characteristic using the same procedure.  In the example below, I wanted to find each instance of the term "vivax" and replace it with an italicized instance of "vivax."

While it is true much of this functionality existed in previous versions of Word buried in various places, the new synthesis in the navigation pane, along with very welcome program behavioral improvements, contributes significantly to the Wow factor of Word 2010.