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Is there a command that takes you back to previous cursor positions in a document?

Anonymous
2017-02-11T17:45:21+00:00

I'm currently editing a large Word document (140 pages, 50K words).  Sometimes my edits require I jump back and forth between distant portions of the document.  It would be great if there were a command that allowed me to successively skip back to each previous cursor position in the document.  Does such a command exist?  The closest I can think of is repeatedly hitting cmd-Z (undo), but that's not a good solution, since I don't want to undo what I've done, I just want to go back to the last places I've been.

Here are two examples of how such a feature would be useful:

  1. Suppose that, to edit something on one page, I need to search for a word that happens to occur on a distant page, copy the sentence with that word, and then return to the first location and paste it there.
  2.  I realize I should correct something I just read, but don't recall where in the document it was.  [Skipping the cursor back is more straightforward than recalling what I read and doing a find, since if the find is too specific it will miss the exact phrasing, and if it's too broad it will give too many hits.]

I'm using MS Word for Mac v. 15.30 (Office 365).

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-02-12T01:36:20+00:00

    There is no such feature. I have not heard of any macros that would extend the <SHF><F5> feature for more points.

    Download the following free e-book:

    Computer Tools for Editors (and Proofreaders)

    by Paul Beverley, LCGI

    Formerly “Macros for Writers, Editors and Proofreaders”

    http://www.archivepub.co.uk/book.html

    It is a collection of over 400 macros created by a professional book editor. It may have something you can use, or can extend.

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  1. Bob Jones AKA CyberTaz MVP 435K Reputation points
    2017-02-11T19:03:57+00:00

    From Word 2016 for Mac Help on keyboard shortcuts:

    Move to the previous insertion point Shift + F5

    (Note that if you have a laptop or condensed keyboard you may need to use the fn key depending on your Function Key setting in  OS X System Preferences.)

    The keystroke executes the GoBack command, which also can be added to the QAT and/or Ribbon.

    The command will backtrack through as many as the last 5 edit locations.

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-02-12T23:08:18+00:00

    It's an interesting suggestion, but I don't want to have to create a bookmark, and then find that bookmark, each time I want to jump back (and that wouldn't work if I hadn't anticipated the need to go back to that particular section).   With numerous edit locations, that would create a burdensome addition to my workflow.  My document has a very detailed TOC, so my current approach is to scroll back to that and click on the appropriate section.

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  3. John Korchok 231.4K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2017-02-12T00:43:51+00:00

    You can take a look at inserting Bookmarks in your document. This allows to to create any number of locations that you may want to return to. Use bookmarks in Word 2016 for Mac

    If you reuse the same bookmark names for every document, you could write simple macros to jump to them, then assign keyboard shortcuts to the macros. Feel free to post again if you need help implementing this.

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-02-11T19:28:53+00:00

    Thanks, that was helpful.  I wasn't aware of that shortcut, and it will come in handy in the future.

    However, it doesn't quite answer my question, since (as your answer indicates) it only works to go back to previous edit points, not previous cursor positions generally.  Thus it wouldn't work for either of the examples I gave in my original post, since in both of those cases the point to which I wanted to return was not one I had edited.  

    Also, just five edits or five cursor positions isn't enough -- I could easily make five edits on a single paragraph in under a minute, at which point the goback function becomes useless.

    At this point I'm guessing such functionality is not built into Word, and that the only option would be to find a macro that someone wrote to accomplish this (or write a macro myself, but that's not something I want to do).

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