Jumping to a Page within a Section

Janis has a long, sectioned document and she wants to use the Go To feature (F5) to go to a specific page in a specific section. For example, she would like to use it to jump to section 4, page 18.

There are actually several ways you can go about navigating to the desired page. The first is to use two passes of the Go To feature:

1. Press F5 or Ctrl+G. Word displays the Go To tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
2. Select Section at the left side of the dialog box. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Go To tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.

3. In the Enter Section Number box enter the section you want to go to.
4. Click the Go To button.
5. Select Page at the left side of the dialog box.
6. In the Enter Page Number box enter a plus sign followed by a value that is one less than the page number within the section that you want to go to. So if you wanted to go to page 18, you would enter +17.
7. Click the Go To button.

Entering the plus sign in step 6 is important. If you don't do that and there is a section earlier in the document that has the same page number (for instance, perhaps section 2 also has a page 18), then it is the page in the earlier section that will be displayed.

There is an easier way to accomplish the same task, however, and it requires only a single use of the Go To dialog box. Follow these steps:

1. Press F5 or Ctrl+G. Word displays the Go To dialog box.
2. Select Page at the left side of the dialog box. (It should be selected by default.)
3. In the Enter Page Number box enter s4p18. This signifies you want to jump to section 4, page 18.
4. Click the Go To button.

This approach to specifying a section number and a page number together may look familiar; it is the same approach you can use when specifying section pages you want to print. If you enter a page number in step 3 that is greater than the number of pages in the section, then Word takes you to the last page in that section. For example, if you entered s4p63 and there were only 47 pages in section 4, then Word takes you to the beginning of page 47.

There is a big caveat to using this simpler approach—it assumes that your document is formatted so that page numbering starts over at the beginning of each section. If, instead, your page numbering is continuous, then you'll need to use the two-pass method described at the first of this tip. If you use the second, shorter method, Word will simply take you to the first page in section 4 because there is no page 18 in the section; page 18 occurred earlier, in a previous section.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (10269) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Jumping to a Page within a Section.