Word: Object Browser
Published on 8th January 2004
To start the year off we are going to look at a great way of scanning through your Word documents for particular things.
To try this out open a long document (If you have one) that has some pictures, tables or you have used heading styles .
The Object Browser is the group of three buttons near the bottom-right corner of the Word screen. There are two double-arrow buttons and a dot button between them.
Normally the arrow buttons are black, and in this mode they take you to the top of the next or previous page.
However, click the dot and you get a choice of other ways of browsing through your document. Move the mouse across the gallery of choices, let it hover on each one and the little tip will tell you that the choices enable you to browse through by table, edit, graphic, etc.
Once you have made one of these choices the arrow buttons turn blue and will now take you to the next or previous example of your chosen object.
The browser will remain set on the chosen type until you make another choice or exit from Word. NB: The first choice is to browse by page which resets the browser.
One of the choices is Find (the binoculars icon), which you can use to search for certain text. Taking this choice will open the Find dialog box in the same way as if you started it in the traditional way (Edit - Find or [Ctrl]+[f]). Whichever method you use to start the Find, once you have entered what you a looking for you can close the Find dialog and the browser buttons will be blue and set to jump to the next/previous instance of that text.
Browsing by Edits will take you through the changes you have made since you last opened the document.
So next time you want to search through your document, remember the browser as a simple way of going through one-by-one without any dialog boxes blocking your view.