Working with several documents

Word and OpenOffice Writer let you work on several documents at once. Whenever you open a new document or choose File, New to start a new document from scratch, they open another document window.

All the document windows appear as buttons on the taskbar. To switch from one document to another, click its button on the taskbar.

• A quick way to switch from one document window to another is to press the Alt+Tab key combination.

• Another way to switch documents is to use the Window menu. Alas, the Window menu displays only the first nine Word documents you have open (which is a bunch). For any more than nine windows, you see a More Windows menu item that displays the entire list of all the documents and windows you're working on in Word. OpenOffice, on the other hand displays an ever-lengthening list.

• The goings-on in one document are independent of any other: Printing, spell checking, and formatting affect only the document you can see on screen.

• You can copy a block from one document to the other. Just mark the block in the first document, copy it (press Ctrl+C), open the second document, and paste it in (Ctrl+V). Or you can drag it down to the button on the taskbar representing the destination document, wait for the word processor to maximise that document and then release the mouse to insert it at the cursor  .