Copywriter, technical writer, translator (FR>EN, ES>EN, IT>EN), journalist

Viewing two pages at once

It’s easy enough to do when you read a dead tree book – just put your thumb in the table of contents or index while you flip from page to page looking for the stuff you want.

You can easily view two documents on screen as well, in separate windows. Viewing two pages in the same Microsoft Word document is also possible, using a little device that often goes unnoticed.

For instance, if I want to refer to the table of contents in this book, I just drag the scroll bar slider right to the top of the document. But getting to a specific page means a jump somewhere else, only to return to the contents.

But if you check out the top of the scroll bar to the right of the document, you’ll see a little icon cut in half horizontally. It looks like this. (Sorry about the loss of resolution – the actual icon is pretty tiny.)

Microsoft Word page separator icon

If you drag this icon down the scroll bar, you get to separate the Word screen into two independent document windows that look like this.

Microsoft Word - viewing two pages from the same document

The table of contents sits in the top document window, and the content sits below. Of course, you can choose where specific pages go – this is just my preference.