Printing the Navigation Pane

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated May 2, 2020)

Ben likes using the Navigation pane in Word. He wonders if there is a way to print the contents (and just the contents) of the Navigation pane.

There is no built-in method to do this in Word. The best you can do is to use a screen-capture utility to grab an image of the screen which you can later print. Of course, if your document is long and the wording in the Navigation pane scrolls beyond the bottom of the screen, you'll want to make sure that the screen-capture utility you select can handle scrolling windows. (There are many that can do this, such as SnagIt from Techsmith.)

There is one other approach, and its acceptability depends on why you wanted to print the Navigation pane in the first place. If your desire was to simply get a printout of the outline of your document, there are better ways to do that. Most notably you can display the outline on screen (click the Outline View icon on the status bar or click Outline from the View tab of the ribbon), adjust the display so that whatever headings you want are displayed, and then print. You end up with an outline that has the same content that was in the Navigation pane, even if it is not formatted the same way as it would have been in the Navigation pane.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11878) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Office 365.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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