News, Tips, and Advice for Technology Professionals

Quickly jump from table to table in a Word document

You don't have to scroll through a lot of extraneous data to find the next table in your document. Use one of two quick and easy methods for finding the previous or the next table.

If a document contains several tables, you might want to move from table to table without scrolling through all the text between them. The good news is -– you can! Actually, there are two ways to jump from one table, avoiding text, to another in a Word document: Go To and Select Browse Object. Using Go To (or [F5]) is probably the best known method, but this method leaves the Find And Replace dialog box on top of the document, which might obscure the text. You can always move it, but it’s still a bit of a nuisance. To use Go To to move from table to table, do the following:

Press [F5].
In the resulting Find And Replace dialog box, choose Table from the Go To What list.
Click Previous or Next, appropriately.
Repeat step 3 until you’re done.
Click Close to close the Find And Replace dialog box.

If the dialog box is a problem, use the Select Browse Object instead. This button is at the bottom right of your screen, just below the vertical scroll bar. There’s a small round dot with arrows just above and below. You might find this method of jumping from table to table a bit easier:

Click the Select Browse Object button to display a palette of objects.
From the palette, choose Browse By Table.
Click Next (the down arrow below the button) to select the next table in the document or click Previous (the up arrow above the button) to select the previous table.

Either method is better than scrolling through pages of text, but the Select Browse Object doesn’t display a dialog box on top of the document. You can use this tool to find several types of objects, not just tables.

About Susan Harkins

Susan Sales Harkins is an IT consultant, specializing in desktop solutions. Previously, she was editor in chief for The Cobb Group, the world's largest publisher of technical journals.