Word 2010’s Navigation Pane
I've been using Office 2010 for several months now. I'm not sure what combination of lucky circumstances combined to have Microsoft invite me to be on an early "technical preview" of the beta, but what the heck.
My first impressions were decidedly un-impressed. The interface is mostly the same as that of Office 2007. (For the record: I very much like the Office 2007 interface. I'll admit it takes some getting used to, but it's mostly an improvement.) Outlook has been given a facelift to match the rest of the Office suite. The File menu (what Microsoft called the "Office Button" in 2007 has been renamed back to the more appropriate "File Menu" this time around) takes over the whole screen – which I'm not sure I like – but has some useful additions. I am particularly a fan of the new Print dialog, which at long last includes Print Preview.
Mostly, however, I just dug in and started working in Word 2010. When I said above that I wasn't overly impressed it wasn't because of anything partiularly wrong with the software; I just didn't see much that was different. Because its interface was, as I mentioned, mostly the same as the 2007 interface, I didn't really spend much time playing around trying to discover new features. Okay, I'll be honest. I didn't spend any time looking for new things. Thus, I was pretty shocked this week when I stumbled upon what has to be the single coolest feature of Office 2010.
First, some background. Over the last three years, I've spent a lot of time in Word, an obvious side effect of writing books. Quite often, I thank the years I spent teaching Word, since there is no doubt that being a "power user" makes my life much easier today.
My books all have to follow very specific formatting rules. My publisher provides me with a template that I use for writing. The template is actually nothing more than an empty Word document with a bunch of predefined styles. Back when I used to teach Word regularly, I would tell my students that using and understanding styles was the single most important thing to know about Word. With the introduction of the Navigation pane, styles just became even more useful.
The Navigation Pane is in fact something that I stumbled across purely by accident, thanks to another change that was made. I recently had cause to do a find and replace in one of the chapters of my latest book. Word has long had separate shortcuts for Find (ctrl-F) and Replace (ctrl-H); however, since both traditionally occupied the same dialog box, I have always used the ctrl-F shortcut, even when I needed Replace. I did this mostly because every other program in which I regularly use Find and Replace combines them into a single dialog, with ctrl-F as the shortcut. So, when I went to use the feature in 2010, I was a bit shocked when ctrl-F did not open the normal dialog box, but instead, this strange Navigation Pane suddenly appeared down the right side of my screen. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out where the heck Replace was, before finally determining that that functionality hadn't been moved from its original location along with Find. (That does mean that unfortunately I'm going to have to train myself to use ctrl-H from now on for Replace, which is the one bad point in this saga.)
I quickly discovered a nice feature of the new Find in word: it now searches as you type. For instance, in the picture below, I only needed to type "bur" for it to find Burke, the fictional realty company used in the class. It also displays the results more like a search engine, giving a few words or sentences to either side of the found term, and allowing you to click to jump to that spot in the document. Both the search-as-you-type and display of the results should make finding instances of terms in Word much, much easier and far nicer than the old method, whereby you had to keep repeatedly clicking the "Find Next" button to get to the next result.
(Due to confidentiality agreements, I can't show anything from the book, so I'm using a practice file from a Word class for these screenshots.)
Find, however, isn't what's great about the Navigation Pane. Instead, it's the other two tabs that make this feature so nice. The middle tab is a Browse Pages feature. If you've ever looked at a PDF document in Adobe Acrobat, you'll be familiar with this: it shows a small thumbnail of each page in the document. Again, you can simply click on a thumbnail to jump to that point in the document.
The other tab (which is actually the first tab, since I'm doing this in reverse order) is what really got my attention. I'm currently writing a book in Wiley's Bible series. As such, each chapter has a series of main headings, with one and sometimes two levels of headings below each main heading. The first page of each chapter has a list of the main topics, and the last page, a bulleted summary. In both cases, I need to be sure to go through the chapter and be certain that each topic is in the list. Prior to discovering the Navigation Pane, that required a ton of scrolling up and down through the chapter. Now, thanks to this feature, I won't have to do that anymore.
This first tab shows the Outline view. Word has long had the ability to read its Heading styles and generate an outline from them. In fact, for many years you've been able to take that outline and automatically generate a table of contents or even a PowerPoint presentation from it. However, from the work I need to do, it still wasn't terribly useful, as it was a completely separate view that only displayed the outline levels. In Word 2010, they've taken that outline view and placed it in the Navigation Pane, where it is more easily accessible. It's also really useful, since you can simply click on a heading in the view and jump right to that point in the document.
Another issue I've been having throughout the development of the book is numbering figures. In each chapter, I need to reference each figure sequentially. For example, the first figure in chapter 7 would be 7.1, the second 7.2, and so forth. My problem is that often I'll add a figure, and then write for quite awhile before I hit the next one. By that point, I can't quite recall which number I'm on, so again, I had to start scrolling up the document to find it. Even more challenging was the editing process: if I add several figures in the middle of a chapter, I not only have to figure out what number to use to start, but then be sure that every subsequent figure gets renumbered as well.
That problem is now gone as well. The Navigation Pane is set to work with Word's outline level, which is part of a style definition. This again is nothing new – it's just been made more useful. Because Wiley was already requiring that I format the figure references with a style, all I needed to do was to go into the style definition and add that the figure style was part of the outline. Once I did that, each of my figure references appears in the Navigation pane as well, meaning that I can tell at a glance which number I'm on and as easily tell if any figures have incorrect numbers.
It's impossible for me to tell exactly how much time this feature is going to save, but it'll be a lot. For me, there's no question that this feature alone will justify the cost of upgrading to Office 2010 when it is finally released.
