One of the most difficult things that people find with working with columns in Word is moving between the columns.
The reason is that the process itself is anything but easy.
The Tab key, which will move you between cells in columns in a table, doesn’t work inside newspaper style columns in Word so that key is out.
Instead, to move or jump from one column to the next you’ll press Alt + Page Down to go to the column on the right (the second column) or Alt + Page Up to move to the first column.
When you click Alt + Page Down, if you are in column 1 you’ll go to the very top of column 2. If you keep pressing the key you’ll flip between the top character in each column.
If you’re somewhere in column 2, when you press Alt + Page Up you’ll go to the top of column 1.
These are the only specialist keys for moving or switching between columns – we could use more – like jumping from a line in one column to the same line in the one next to it – but nada! Sorry!
Thank you for sharing this! It’s such an annoying thing to use for me in Word, I have discovered. Hopefully it will get better now that I know this. 🙂
Thank you! Very helpful.
Do you charge for ‘subscriptions’ to your news letters?
Thank you for solving the column access problem for me.
Does not work for me: Word 2010. Alt-Page Up/Down no effect, no switching.
Switching project to WordPerfect: handles columns so much more elegantly.
Considering how far back comments on this issue go, I think it’s an incredibly irresponsible and blatant lack of care for the consumer for Microsoft Windows to have ignored this relatively easy to fix problem. If your software engineers really can’t resolve the problem on their own, I have an easy solution: call WordPerfect!
It doesn’t work in word 2013.