10 Minute Guide to Word for Windows 95

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Opening Multiple Documents

In this lesson, you'll learn how to open multiple documents in Word for Windows.

Why Use Multiple Documents?

You may feel that working on one document at a time is quite enough. In some situations, however, the ability to work on multiple documents at the same time can be very useful. You can refer to one document while working on another, and you can copy and move text from one document to another. Essentially, Word for Windows can have an unlimited number of documents open, simultaneously.

Starting a New Document

You can start a new document while you're working on an existing document. To do so, follow the procedures you learned in Lesson 3 for creating a new document. Briefly:

Opening an Existing Document

While working in one document, you can also open another existing document. Simply select File Open, or click the File Open button on the Standard toolbar and select the name of the document file you want to open (you learned the details of opening documents in Lesson 7). A new window opens and displays the document that you opened. Both the newly opened and the original documents are in memory, and can be edited, printed, and so on. You can continue opening additional documents until all of the files you need to work with are open.

Switching Between Documents

When you have multiple documents open at one time, only one of them can be active at a given moment. The active document is displayed on-screen (although inactive documents may be displayed as well). More important, the active document is the only one affected by editing commands.

To switch between open documents:

1. Select Window. The Window menu lists all open documents. A check marks the name of the currently active document (see Figure 29.1).

Figure 29.1
The Window menu, indicating the currently active document.

2. Select the name of the document you want active. You can either click the document name with the mouse, or press the corresponding number key.

3. The selected document becomes active and is displayed on the screen.


Timesaver Tip: Next Please! To cycle to the next open document, press Ctrl+F6.

Controlling Multiple Document View

Word gives you a great deal of flexibility in displaying multiple documents. You can have the active document occupy the entire screen, with other open documents temporarily hidden. You can also have several documents displayed at the same time, each in its own window. A document window can be in one of three states:

Figure 29.3 shows both a restored and a minimized document.

Here are the procedures for controlling how multiple documents are displayed:

Figure 29.2
A Maximized document window.

Figure 29.3
Restored and minimized document windows


When a document is in the restored state, you can control the size and position of its window. To move the window, point at its title bar and drag it to the new position. To change window size, point at a border or corner of the window (the mouse pointer changes to a 2-headed arrow), then drag the window to the desired size.

Word offers a command that can be useful when you want to view all of your open documents. Select Window Arrange All to tile all document windows. When you tile your documents, every open document is displayed in a small window with no overlapping. If you have more than a few documents open, these windows will be quite small and won't be very useful for editing. They are useful, however, for seeing exactly what documents you have open and finding the one you need to work on at the moment. Figure 29.4 shows the result of the Arrange All command with 6 documents open.

Figure 29.4
Six documents displayed with the Arrange All command.


In this lesson, you learned how to open and display multiple documents. The next lesson shows you how to work with multiple documents.


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