How to hide and unhide whitespace, headers and footers in Microsoft Word

For now at least, I edit a lot of security documents as part of my job. Today, I saw something I hadn’t seen before: Word 2010 was hiding all of the headers, footers, and whitespace in the document. That made navigating the document a whole lot faster and easier, but it also meant I couldn’t verify that the headers and footers were correct.

The solution was simple but non-obvious, and works in all versions of Word that I know of.

The solution is to hover the mouse over the gap between the pages, and then double-click. Duh.

Helpfully, Word 2003 actually gives you a tooltip when you hover between the pages, so curmudgeons like me who haven’t upgraded actually stand a chance of learning this shortcut. (I can only be a curmudgeon at home, however.) Word 2010 gives you no such feedback.

I’ve been using Word for about 18 years and somehow I’ve never seen this feature. I’m glad I have now, though–hiding the whitespace makes document navigation faster, and seems to make Word 2010 behave better.

Similar Posts:

Page 1 of 3 | Next page