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Document Double Personality

Word's Split Window feature lets you edit documents in two places at once.

George Campbell

In long documents, it can be handy to view two parts of the same document at once, letting you edit either part or cut and paste between two sections. Word makes this easy, but few users know the trick. First, you'll need to divide your document into two scrollable windows.

Select Window, Split. A thick black line will appear on the screen; move the line up or down to the place where you want the screen to be divided, then click to set the position. Each window pane will have its own ruler.

While the window is split, you can scroll each pane independently of the other and you can select and drag blocks of text between the two panes. All commands, such as Edit, Find or Edit, Replace affect only the pane containing the cursor. Any changes you make in one pane, however, will appear in both automatically. One other important thing to remember: The split window only appears in the documents to which you've applied this feature; any other open Word documents will display their documents in a single pane unless you split their windows.

When you're finished working in the split window view, select Window, Remove Split.

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