Word X Tip: Page Up and Page Down without moving cursor

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
January 23rd, 2004 • 4:33 am

In a document window in Normal view mode in Microsoft Word X, the default behaviour of the “Page Up” and “Page Down” keys is to jump approximately one screen up or down and to move the cursor (insertion point) accordingly.

I personally find this highly problematic, because it means that if I want to scroll up or down my document without moving the insertion point, I have to take my hand off the keyboard and grab the mouse and use the scroll bar.

The typical situation where this happens is the following. I am typing text, starting at the top of the window. When I reach the bottom of the window and continue typing, Word makes the document scroll up inside the window in order to ensure that what I am typing (i.e. where the insertion point currently is) remains visible. But it stays at the bottom of the window. And I don’t like that. When I am typing text, I like to be much higher in the documeot window and have a large expanse of empty space below, so that the text that I am typing is approximately at eye level at all times.

If I use the Page Down key to adjust the position of the text and the insertion point and bring them closer to the top of the window, then Word also moves the insertion point at the same time, which is clearly not what I want. Yes, I want to jump one screen down so that the text and insertion point that are currently at the bottom of the window will appear at the top of the window, but I want the insertion point to stay exactly where it is!

Fortunately, with a couple of simple macros, I can change this behaviour. The macros are the following:

Sub MyPageDown()
        ActiveWindow.ActivePane.LargeScroll Down:=1
End Sub

Sub MyPageUp()
        ActiveWindow.ActivePane.LargeScroll Up:=1
End Sub

These two macros do exactly what I would like the Page Down and Page Up keys to do in Word, i.e. scroll down or up one screen, while leaving the insertion point where it is.

Once I have saved these two macros, all I need to do is go to the “Customize” dialog, click on the “Keyboard…” button, and assign the Page Down key to the MyPageDown macro and the Page Up key to the MyPageUp macro.

Word will of course complain that these keyboard shortcuts are already assigned to built-in Word commands (namely “PageDown” and “PageUp”), but that’s OK, because I don’t want to use these built-in commands, so they can lose their keyboard shortcut.

Once this is done, and I’ve made sure the Normal template with all these changes is saved, I can use the Page Down and Page Up keys in any document window to do exactly what I want, i.e. jump down or up one screen without moving the insertion point.

Sometimes Word will jump a full screen and, because the insertion point was not exactly on the last line of visible text at the bottom of the window, it will become invisible, because it will be a few lines to high in relation to the visible part of the document in the window. But that’s no big deal. As soon as I resume typing, Word will automatically scroll back up a few lines in order to make the insertion point and the text around it visible. And if I want to make the insertion point visible without typing text, I can always just hit one of the cursor keys, which will have the same effect.

So there you have it. By following the instructions above, you can make the Page Down and Page Up keys in Word behave like scrolling commands rather than commands that move the insertion point. And then you can easily force the text that you are currently typing to be at eye level without having to take your hand off your keyboard and grab the mouse.


4 Responses to “Word X Tip: Page Up and Page Down without moving cursor”

  1. Demetris Kikizas says:

    Pierre,

    Just a word of thanks. I was looking for this a long time. I copied and pasted the two macros into my Word 97 for Windows and they work perfectly. Only, as you say, I lose sight of the line I was in, until I start typing again. I assigned them to Alt+1 and Alt+2, to retain the default PageUp and PageDown.

    Thank you again,

    Demetris

  2. Aaron Andrade says:

    Thank you! Good fix for an annoying attribute of Word.

    Aaron

  3. Aaron says:

    Thank you! Good fix for an annoying attribute of Word.

    Aaron

  4. Sigurjón Halldórsson B!son says:

    Thanks! I too find this annoying in Word. I chose the SmallScroll solution and assigned the macros to Ctrl+Alt+[Up Arrow] and Ctrl+Alt+[Down Arrow] respectively.
    /B!son

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