The rationale: Often when I'm using Word or Excel at work I end up spending a lot of time moving around in large documents. This can be a real pain, if you have to enter something in at the top, and then enter something else at the bottom, and then enter something in the middle, especially if you have to do it fifty times.

The idea: What I want is some worm-holes in my documents. Not the sort you find in apples or furniture, the sort you find in Star Trek. These are impossible in real life, but should be pretty easy to create in Office. The way it works is this: you position the cursor where you want the wormhole, and then select Wormhole from the menu. You then have to position the exits to the wormhole (you can have up to three other exits, making 4 in all), and it's done. Simple.

Now when you are zooming around your document, you can just move the cursor into the wormhole with the cursor keys. You then choose the exit you want (again using the cursor keys, hence the limit of 4 exits) and the cursor pops out at the other wormhole.

To avoid this becoming annoying, the cursor has to stop on the wormhole briefly to go in. This allows you to just skim over it if you're not trying to warp.
-- spacemoggy, Nov 25 2004

Minus the multiple exit feature, this already exists.

WORD HOWTO: Create an end point using Insert | Bookmark... Create a start point using Insert | Cross-reference... At the start point, you can have various text appear, such as a page or section number, the actual text that is at the endpoint, or the word "above" or "below". If you truly want to use this simply as a navigation feature, and not have it appear in the printed version of your document, simply mark the start and end points as "hidden" text, and when you print make sure it is configured to not print hidden text (this is done in Tools | Options... on the Print tab).

EXCEL HOWTO: To create an end point, pick Insert | Name | Define... to name a cell or range of cells. To create a start point, pick Insert | Hyperlink... and click the Bookmark button in the dialog that appears. I don't know of an equivalent to Hidden text in Excel.

You navigate by clicking the start points with your mouse. There may be a keyboard way to do it, but it is not obvious to me.

(I have Office 2000, the exact menu items may vary. But these features have existed for a while).
-- krelnik, Nov 25 2004


I use vi (a unix editor) --- you can define marks in the document that can be used to navigate or edit the document. For example typing mm means create a mark called m at the current cursor position. I have not tried it but I guess 26 marks can be created and referenced in the document.

Baked --- but I reserve negative votes for bad ideas...
-- madness, Nov 25 2004


Baked - you can hyperlink doccuments. In XL you can hyperlink cells. In word, if you use the index function, it automatically hyperlinks to the headers.
-- energy guy, Nov 30 2004



random, halfbakery