Once you've started to use Word 2010 you'll have found many new features. Amongst these is the very useful Navigation Pane, which lets you navigate through long documents very easily. Discover how to use this pane in this short east to follow article.

We'll describe the Navigation Pane using a simple example. Suppose you create a new Word 2010 document and add some content over several pages. Let's say that in this document you have paragraphs of text with headings and sub headings as appropriate. To illustrate using the Navigation Pane fully you need to apply styles to all the headings. So the first heading could have the TITLE style and then other headings could have the styles HEADING1, HEADING2 and so on. The styles are added using the Styles commands in the Home tab.

Then to show the Navigation Pane, choose the View tab and in the SHOW commands group tick the checkbox for NAVIGATION PANE. The pane will now show on the left hand side. The Navigation Pane has three tabs to enable you to view the document in different ways, by styles, by miniature previews and by searches.

The first tab navigates using styles. If you hover over the first tab you'll see the help text "Browse the headings in your document". Choose this tab and you'll see in the pane lists of all the headings in the document containing heading styles. This view is similar to the Outline view in previous Word versions. If you click on any heading in the left hand pane, the main document jumps to the same location. So good use of heading names helps you navigate a long document very easily.

The second tab navigates using miniature pages. If you hover over this tab you'll see the help text "Browse the pages in your document". Select the tab and you'll see what this means - miniature previews of each page with page numbers under each. You can scroll down the miniatures list much fast than scrolling the actual document to find a page of interest, select it in the pane and the same page is selected it in the main document.

The third tab navigates using search results. If you hover over this tab you'll see the help text "Browse the results from your current search". Select the tab and start typing some text. You'll see that Word automatically updates it search after each key press, and highlights in yellow all occurrences of the text in the main document. If you keep typing until you complete the word or words, the auto search changes to match the latest text in the search box. Once you found some searched for text, look in the lower part of the Navigation Pane. You'll see that Word lists the piece of text where each located item was found. Click on any piece changes the selected highlighted in the main document to that item.

If you change your mind and delete the search text, and then start entering new text, the auto search updates again. By the way if you then decide to highlight text using the TEXT HIGHLIGHT COLOR command on the Home tab, the auto highlights turn off.

This third tab has some extra interesting features too. For example if your Word document contains objects such as images, shapes, SmartArt items or tables, these can also be searched for. You might like to add some of these items to your document and try this out. You can specify which kind of item to look for. To do this choose the Search tab in the Navigation Pane and start a fresh search if necessary by clicking the small cross symbol to the right of the search box. You'll then see a small magnifying glass icon. Click this and under the FIND heading choose GRAPHICS. The Navigation Pane will then show how many items were found. You can't preview the found graphics, but you can navigate through them in the main document by clicking the UP or DOWN arrows just to the right of the Pane Tabs.

If you click the magnifying glass icon again you'll see there are other very useful FIND options available such as Find and Replace and Go To.

Once you're finished using the Navigation Pane you can close it by clicking the small cross at the top right of the pane. So there we have it, the Word 2010 Navigation Pane. This makes navigating a long document very easy and you can do this in three main ways, using styles, using page miniatures and using search criteria. The search criteria option also has many useful advanced search features such as searching for images or tables. Interested in learning more about Word 2010? A really effective way is to attend a training course and learn lots more about Word 2010 features in a short time.