Tech’ top tips – #36. Can you do the splits?

This tip is provided by the Centre for Enhancing Learning through Technology (CELT). The images in this post will expand when clicked.

When working with long documents or spreadsheets it can be really useful to use the Split Window view to help with formatting, reading and to track calculations. I find this especially useful in the following scenarios:

1. When inserting images or graphs into Word splitting the window helps to ensure I get the alignment and placement consistent throughout the document. Selecting View>Split means that I can scroll through different sections of the document and make sure formatting is consistent.Here’s how the draft of this post looks when split in MS Word. By splitting the window I can get my images sized consistently before aligning them.
2. When electronic papers are provided for meetings it is useful to split the window to ensure we see any papers while keeping of the agenda. Here’s an example of a 72 page set of amalgamated meeting papers with the agenda (page 1) at the top and one of the associated papers (page 23) showing in the bottom half of the screen. To create this view in Adobe Reader click View>Split.
3. As mentioned, splitting the window can help us to keep track of large spreadsheets but unlike Word and Reader Excel can be spilt two ways to enable four separate areas of a spreadsheet to be viewed simultaneously. This spreadsheet ranges from A:1 to CV:5712 but with a split I can see all four corners at the same time.