Efficient cursor movement and scrolling are foundational skills for working productively in any document environment. This content covers the full range of navigation techniques available in Windows, from mouse controls to essential keyboard shortcuts.
Scrolling & Cursor Navigation
Scrolling and moving our cursor around exactly where we want it to go, in a very efficient manner, may seem like a very simple topic, and it really is, because we do it all the time. But if you want to see a pro at work and what you can get to, take a look at a developer. They're very efficient in how they move around within a document. If you emulate that, then you can get really efficient with programming, and you can get really efficient with moving around within a document. It just makes everything that you do so much easier.
I have a window open here, and one thing I could do is I can just select the document and use my arrow keys to go up and down. That would be a quick way of scrolling through all of these different documents.
Another way is to use the scroll bar here on the right. I could use the arrows to go line by line, go up and down. Or I can use the scroll bar right here, or what's also called the thumb, to move up and down. I can grab it with the mouse and move it up and down by clicking and dragging that. Or I can click right above it to go page by page. I can go page by page up or page by page down.
Let's jump into a Word document. This is through my browser, but it is through Office 365. So this is a Word document, and I have the bar here on the right hand side, so I can scroll through the document. I just repeated the same thing over and over again, so it's four pages of essentially the same thing, and so we can see what's happening on here.
One thing I could do is use the mouse and the wheel on the mouse to go up and down through this document. That's one quick way to go through this. But the other way that I can do is I can hold down the control key and use the same wheel, and watch what happens: now I'm zooming in on this. This is a great way to zoom in and out of a document. And now I'm scrolling and it's really up close.
But you'll also notice that I have a left and right bar down here at the bottom now, so I can scroll left and right using that. Or if I hold down the shift key, I can use my wheel on my mouse to go left and right. So if I let go of the shift key it goes up and down, and I hold the shift key and it goes left and right.
This is a huge help with something like Photoshop. If I'm doing Photoshop, I'll do this constantly. I'll use the control key to zoom in and out of certain sections, I'll use the shift key to go left and right, and I'll use the up and down. So it's a great way to navigate around a document.
I'm going to zoom back out so it's a little more reasonable. The other thing too is that this wheel is a button. If I click on the button, then this little imaginary line appears across where my mouse is at. So imagine a horizontal imaginary line. If I move this mouse above that horizontal line, then it starts scrolling. This is really great when I'm trying to just create a nice slow scroll across something. I can also go down below that imaginary line and it'll scroll down, and it will do it in varying speeds depending on how far away I get from that imaginary line. So it allows me to nice and smoothly scroll through a document, maybe I'm reading or analyzing this document. Once I'm done, I can click that button again, that wheel again, and then it will remove that feature.
If you look at the pros, the programmers, what they'll do is they'll do a lot of keyboard shortcuts. So let's take a look at a few keyboard shortcuts.
To go up and down through this document, I can page up and page down, and it's going to go page by page, flipping through this document. That's one way to do it. Or I can hit the Home, and watch what happens with the Home and the End: what the Home and the End does is it goes to the beginning or end of each of the lines.
I can do the same thing using the control. Let's use control and Home, and now I go to the beginning of the document, and control and End to go to the end of the document.
I've scrolled back up to the sentences now. If I hit just the down and up arrow, you can see it just scrolls through line by line. But let's say I hit control and up and control and down: now it's paragraph by paragraph that it scrolls through this. Same thing if I go left and right, it's going left and right through here character by character; but if I hit the control, now it's doing it word by word.
Now on a Word document, if I hit space, obviously it's going to add a space. But the space bar in like a browser will actually scroll through a document page by page. Or I can do shift and space bar.
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