MS-Word: Go Back to Last Editing Point (SHIFT + F5)

These days, I have been publishing a series of some nice little and useful Microsoft Word tips for increasing your efficiency. Today’s tip is very useful for those who work with long documents and do a lot of editing.

Often times, while editing a document we need to swiftly move around in the document. For example, lets say, at present you are on page number 14 in your document and need to paste a paragraph here. The paragraph to be copied is present in the same document on page number 347. You will scroll down to page 347 and copy the paragraph. But is there is a way for returning back to the page where you were working (i.e. page 14)? Yes, there is a way!

If you press Shortcut combination SHIFT + F5 in an MS-Word document, the cursor moves to the location where you were last editing. So, as in the above given example, after copying the required paragraph on page 347, if you’ll press SHIFT+F5, cursor will automatically move to page 14 (the page where you were working).

If you keep pressing this key combination again and again, cursor will cycle through last three positions where you edited the document and finally the cursor will return back to the present position.

Another Tip: Some versions of MS-Word remember the last edited location in a document that you’ve closed. When you’ll open this document again and press SHIFT+F3. the cursor will jump to the point where you were editing at the time of closing.

One More Tip: If you are a geeky person, you can manually run the command that the above mentioned shortcut key combination executes. Press F5 key to bring up the Go To dialog box. Type \PrevSel1 in the box and click Next button. The cursor will go to the most recent editing position. Keep clicking Next button to cycle through. \PrevSel1 is the bookmark in which MS-Word internally saves most recent edit location.

Let me know if this tip was useful and, as usual, if you can mention something to make this article better –please do!