Shortcut to list open Word documents and activate any of them easily


MS Word 2010 (or earlier) won’t provide a tabbed interface. There exist Word Add-ins that will cover this, but with side effects or faults. A way to handle multiple Word documents is letting them all appear in the Windows Taskbar. If you are after a cleaner desktop, you might prefer to have only the currently activated document appear on the taskbar, but then how are you going to jump to other open documents?

Pressing Ctrl+F6 will activate automatically the next open Word document. Pressing the same shortcut several times will let you locate the document you need, cycle between all open documents, etc.

Another way, especially useful if you have 3 or much more documents open, is to press a shortcut to display a list with all open documents. Then using the arrows you can select the one you need and activate it with Enter.

The command that will do this is called “WindowList”. Go to File > Options > Customize Ribbon > Keyboard Shortcuts and select the WindowList command under the View Tab section. Define a convenient shortcut and you are done!