Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Office Quickie: View your document in multiple windows

Ever wanted to look at another slide in the same presentation while creating it? Or looking up another paragraph in the same document while working on another? Sure, you could split the window in Word 2003, but that was somewhat cumbersome and you only had a vertical split.

Enter the world of Office 2007. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint, you'll find a neat new option in the View Ribbon: New Window. One click and it opens a new window containing the same document.

You can now rearrange both views manually, or use the Arrange All button to quickly put the documents next to each other.

So now you can easily work on a slide in PowerPoint and keep an overview of where it fits in the whole presentation, e.g. by keeping the Slide Sorter view and the slide you're working on, next to each other:

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

to bad you still have to remain inside of the SAME parent window and can't span 2 screens!

Tony said...

Curious. I'm running PowerPoint 2003 and I can select "New Window" from the "Window" menu. The trouble is, it's of no use if (like me) you have multiple monitors and want one window on one monitor and the other on the second. Foolish Microsoft and their MDI.

Kris Gielen said...

Tony,
I stand corrected: you are right, in PowerPoint 2003, you can use the New Window as well.
I therefore removed the sentence "And in PowerPoint 2003, it simply was impossible (apart from opening the same presentation in 2 separate PowerPoint instances)" in the original post, as it was incorrect.
Still, I belive the Office 2007 interface is more consistent and more intuitive, but you are right, the same things can be accomplished in Office 2003.
Kris

Anonymous said...

unfortunately Microsoft killed one of the most useful (and most used) features of powerpoint. Most power users, and pretty much EVERYONE I know edits previous versions of existing decks and copies and pastes between windows. It is one of the most useful reasons to have two monitors - the ability to compare, and cut and paste between monitors.
We have not implemented Office 2007 yet widely and the whole company will FREAK when they realize the two window feature is gone.