February 18, 2009

On the Side

Do you use the miniature slides in MS PowerPoint for navigation purposes?

I don't know about you, but I love them! I can quickly scroll through a long presentation, locate the slide I need to edit, select its miniature version and zoom! I'm there in an instant.

There's no scrolling slide by slide to find what I need. Nope, the miniature slides are just big enough to go right where I want, with a single click of the mouse.

In my opinion, transferring that idea elsewhere would be an awesome thing!

Also, along that train of thought, I'd like to talk about MS Word 2007's thumbnails.

Thumbnails?

Yes, thumbnails!

If you check the Thumbnails checkbox under the View tab on the ribbon, you'll find that something similar to the PowerPoint miniatures appears on the left hand side of your program window.

While it's not exactly like PowerPoint's slide miniatures (you can't duplicate pages or rearrange them the way you do with slides), it's a quick and easy way to navigate through a long document, without being forced to guess where something is located.

Also, while the pages are small, I can definitely see uses for laying out your documents. The thumbnails are updated as you work, so you can see the effect any insertion or deletion has on the overall appearance of several pages in the document at once, without the Print Preview feature or a whole lot of scrolling between pages.

So, there you have it. It's what I consider to be one of the fastest document navigation techniques available!

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