Understanding and Using Bookmarks

Bookmarks allow you to assign names to text or to positions in your document. In this way, you can locate them easily, just like when you put a physical bookmark in a book to save your place. Once a bookmark is defined, you can use the Go To option from the Edit menu to move the insertion point to the bookmark location.

In Word, bookmarks are saved with the document file. Thus, you can assign bookmarks in different files that use the same name. Each file can have up to 16,379 bookmarks defined. Names for bookmarks must follow these rules:

• Names must begin with a letter of the alphabet
• Names can contain only letters, numbers, and the underscore
• Names cannot contain spaces or punctuation marks
• Names must not exceed 40 characters in length

Note that there are also 16 pre-defined bookmarks that have names starting with a backslash character: \Cell, \Char, \Doc, \EndOfDoc, \EndOfSel, \HeadingLevel, \Line, \Page, \Para, \PrecSel2, \PrevSel1, \Section, \Sel, \StartOfDoc, \StartOfSel, and \Table. These predefined bookmarks have special purposes which are beyond the scope of this tip.

To insert a bookmark, follow these steps:

1. Position the insertion point where you want the bookmark to be inserted. Alternately, select the text you want named with the bookmark.
2. Display the Insert tab of the ribbon.
3. Click the Bookmark tool in the Links group. Word displays the Bookmark dialog box. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Bookmark dialog box.

4. Enter a name for your bookmark.
5. Click on Add.

A word of warning with bookmarks: they can move! If you define a bookmark as a location only (in other words, you don't select text before defining the bookmark) and then move the text which appears at that location elsewhere, the bookmark stays where it was; it does not move with the text. It is not always intuitive when this will happen. For example, if you insert text ahead of a defined bookmark, the bookmark will stay with the original text. If, however, you position the cursor at the beginning of a bookmarked line and press Enter a few times, the bookmark does not move. The "unmoving bookmarks" become a real pain if you use them within tables, at the beginning of a column. It is not unusual to sort the table and have the bookmarks not move with the text, as you might expect.

The solution to this problem is to anchor the bookmark to selected text (select text and then define the bookmark). However, this produces other side effects. For example, if the selected text includes a complete paragraph (including the paragraph marker), and you add some text in a new line or paragraph, the added text becomes part of the selected text for the bookmark.

Finally, moving or copying bookmarked text to a new document will copy the bookmarks as well as the text. Moving bookmarked text to a new location in the same document also copies the bookmark but copying bookmarked text to another location in the same document does not replicate the bookmark.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8718) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Understanding and Using Bookmarks.