Richard Holliday – Author

I’ve recently completed another round of editing on my upcoming thriller novel Price War. During that process (about 5-6 weeks) I used a couple of features in Word (in particular, on the View tab) that made this process a lot easier.

Proviso: I am an Office 365 subscriber and these features may only be available in the most recent version of Word. I also use a desktop computer equipped with two 1440p monitors so these exact solutions may have less or limited utility given your own particular system setup.

Viewing your document in multiple windows

During the recent edit of Price War I often had to circle back to earlier chapters in order to properly reference an earlier chapter. In order to keep the current chapter (and it’s associated notes) on screen at the same time, I used the New Window command to open a second window on the same file. This way I could keep one window open at the current chapter I was at, while scrolling back in the other window to a different part of the document. I found this invaluable to avoid a lot of scrolling between parts of the document which could be disorienting.

This feature is also useful for viewing earlier portions of a document while editing something later. This is also achievable in Scrivener as you can open two editors with two different sections open simultaneously, or use Quick Reference to view multiple parts of a project in separate windows. You could also achieve this in a more crude sense using an online word processor like Google Docs by opening the same file in multiple tabs, and then docking those tabs to one half of the screen each.

Using Side-to-side page movement

I discovered that I found it more comfortable to use a side-by-side movement of the pages of my manuscript as I was editing, as opposed to the more traditional scrolling vertical view.

I found this was a better use of the horizontal screen real estate that my particular desktop setup has. More importantly, I found it adhered better to the traditional page paradigm – it was much more akin to flicking through a stack of pages on my desk and making my edits. This may be useful to other authors.

This is better than using View Multiple Pages and staying in vertical view as, in Side-by-Side view, the stack moves more naturally from one page to the next, as opposed to still arranging pages in that “typewriter” style of scrolling through the pages that you will get in vertical page movement, even with multiple or single pages. Some limitations I’ve found is that the “stack” of pages will be dynamic to the size of the Word window, so if you have a higher-resolution monitor you may find this more advantageous, as smaller screens may not be able to display the stack of pages at 100%

Bonus tip: Synchronous scrolling

If you are comparing two different versions of a manuscript (for instance, your working copy and a copy that a beta reader or editor has sent to you with markup or comments), you may wish to use Synchronous Scrolling to keep the documents in sync and not lose your place. Use Compare Side-by-Side on the View tab to enable this option.

This works in all views including vertical and horizontal page views, web view and draft view.

I hope these tips are helpful! Let me know if you have any tips of your own in the comments below!