Reading View in Office 365

Connie recently upgraded from Word 2010 to Office 365. She is very frustrated with the new format of Reading View. In Word 2010, Reading View filled the screen with a nice full-page view. Connie could page forward and backward like a book, giving her a good feel for how the document would look on paper, showing all the headers and footers just as they would appear in print. In Office 365, Reading View doesn't do this, and she cannot find a way to achieve the same effect. Connie wonders if there is a way to make it behave like Word 2010.

In Office 365, there are more ways to view your document than there were in Word 2010. And, with more ways available, that means you'll need to do some experimentation to figure out which viewing mode is best for your needs. It will also depend on the device you are using to view your document. For instance, one particular viewing approach may work great if you are using Word on a tablet with a touch screen, but a different approach will work better if you are using Word on a desktop system. (In this tip, I'm assuming you are using the latter—a desktop system.)

If your desire is to see how your document will look when printed, most people find that Print Layout view works just fine. If you want to see the pages in the document side by side, as they would appear if the document were a book, then simply display the View tab of the ribbon and click the Multiple Pages tool. Use the Zoom control at the bottom-right corner of the document to make sure that you can see two pages at a time on the screen. You can move through the pages using the typical navigation keys, all of your headers and footers appear as they would when printed, plus you can edit your document as you desire.

If you don't want to do any editing (you just want to read), then display the View tab of the ribbon and click the Read Mode tool. Word maximizes what it shows on the screen, and you can still navigate from page to page using the Page Up and Page Down keys. By default, Read Mode doesn't show the document as it "really looks" when printed, which is probably what Connie is experiencing. To see the view better, while in Read Mode, click the View option on the ribbon, then choose Layout | Paper Layout. This will get you very close to what you had in Word 2010.

If, in Read Mode, you want to see multiple pages at the same time, then get out of Read Mode (press Esc) and click the Multiple Pages tool on the View tab of the ribbon. Go back into Read Mode and you can adjust the zoom level to display the side-by-side pages you want.

You may also want to experiment with Focus Mode, which is available on the View tab of the ribbon. Some people find it very helpful for removing screen distractions and focusing just on the document. This mode is affected, too, by whether you have Word configured for single or multiple pages before entering the mode.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12925) applies to Microsoft Word 2010 and 2021.