How To Navigate Large Documents and Web Pages With Keyboard Shortcuts

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use your Mac's keyboard to scroll through long documents. 

So sometimes you work with long documents in apps like Pages or Numbers. Sometimes we do them in Preview or there could be long webpages in Safari. When having to scroll through these documents you can certainly use mouse or trackpad to do so. There is also on the screen scroll bars to the right side of the content, usually activated as you scroll with the mouse or trackpad. You can use those to scroll through long documents as well. 

But there are ways to do it with just the keyboard if you prefer. For instance, here in Pages I've got a very long document here. It's about a 100 pages long. If I want to scroll through it with my keyboard I can use the buttons Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End. These will allow me to go page by page using Page Down, like that, or Page Up to go back up. Now this scrolls up and down based on how much content is seen on the screen, not the page, say, in Pages. The End key takes you to the very end of the document and the Home Key takes you to the very beginning of the document. 

But wait a minute! Most of us don't have Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End on our keyboard. Those keys are only available on the Mac Extended Keyboard which would mostly be iMac, MacMini, and Mac Studio users who have opted to get that larger keyboard. But on other Mac Keyboards you can access these if you know the hidden combination. That's to use the Globe or fn key and the four arrow keys. So if you hold down the Globe Key you can use Up and Down to match Page Up and Page Down. So I can hold the Globe Key down and use the down arrow and it works just like Page Down. I can use the Globe Key and up arrow and it works just like Page Up. Likewise the two remaining keys, right and left, those can be used for End and Home. So Globe and right arrow goes to the End. Globe and left arrow goes Home. 

These are just alternative ways to access the Page Up and Page Down, Home and End functions on keyboards that don't have those keys. This should work with just about any app. The Globe and right arrow takes me to the End of this Numbers sheet. Globe and left arrow takes me to the beginning. Globe down and Globe up will do Page Down and Page Up. Here in Preview it is the same thing. You can use the Globe and the arrow keys to go to the End, to the beginning, Page Down and Page Up. Likewise in Safari if you have a long webpage here you can use the Globe and arrow keys for the End and Home and Page Down and Page Up. 

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Now Safari actually has additional shortcuts for Page Down and Page Up. You can simply press the Spacebar and it will work just like Page Down. For Page Up use Shift and Space to go up. The reason that these work in Safari but not in Pages and Numbers and other places where you type is that, of course, pressing the Spacebar normally would type a space. But here I'm not entering any text. If I was entering text, like if I clicked in the Search Field here, then the Spacebar does actually work just like a spacebar and type that character. So you have to be set in a mode where you have nothing selected. There's no place for you to type and then the space and Shift space will work. As you might guess in Preview there's another case where you're probably not typing text in any kind of field. If you're not Spacebar will work like Page Down, and Shift Space like Page Up. 

In addition you can also use the Command Key and the Down Arrow to go to the End and the Command Key and the Up Arrow to go to the beginning. Command right and left don't do anything. It's a little bit confusing because with the Globe Key you use the right and left for End and Home. But Command Down and Command Up in Preview do kind of the same thing. The same in Safari here. Command Down and Command Up will go to the End and the Beginning. Plus, Safari also reacts to Option Down and Option Up for Page Down and Page Up. The same with Preview. Option Down and Option Up work like Page Down and Page Up. 

Those, of course, wouldn't work in Pages. You've got a blinking cursor here and Option Down moves the text cursor to the end of the line. Option Up to the beginning of the line. But Command Down and Command Up do work. But they work a little differently. You've got the blinking text cursor here. What Command Down does is moves the text cursor to the end of the document. So it does act like it is scrolling to the end but a big difference is now the text cursor is there at the bottom. Command Up puts it at the top.  However, if you use the Globe and right arrow that's the same as the End key. It goes to the end but the cursor is still where it was before. It is still at the beginning. So if I were to type something like the letter A you could see it types it there and actually jumps to where the cursor is because you've just typed a character there. 

Now when you are using an app like Pages there's a lot you can do to move around using the text cursor as kind of an element to push things into view. So, for instance, if I were to arrow down here through all of this text and then continue, you could see it actually scrolls. So I always have that text cursor in view. If I were to use the Option Key and down it goes to the end of the paragraph. So if I were to do that, I kind of scroll by always moving that cursor to the end of the next paragraph and thus scrolling the document. So, the cursor is still in view. The same with Option Up here. 

In Numbers if you select a cell and then you use the arrow keys to scroll down it will also keep the selected cell in view. So, for instance, if you use Command Down it will go to the last cell. You can see that's what is selected there. It also scrolls the document so you can see that selection. So it's different than using Globe and right or the end key which just takes you to the end but the selection is still the same as before. So if I move to the right, with the right arrow, you can see it comes back here because that's where the selection is.  

Another technique I like to use to get to the end sometimes is use a quick Command A, which selects everything and then the right arrow. The right arrow basically tries to position the cursor at the end of the selection which then in turn scrolls the document to the end. Command A and then left arrow will take you to the beginning. 

Now let's talk about a way to jump around in the document, not by page or to the very end or beginning,. but to find something specific. You can simply use the Find Function for it. We usually think of using find to be able to locate some text to be able to change it. But you can use it to jump around as well. For instance, if I wanted to jump to Chapter 17 I can guess that, that's going to be Chapter 17 and a colon. So I can just search for that. A quick Command F is the same as Edit Find, like that. So, Command F and then I type Chapter 17 and probably don't need the colon, then you can see it automatically just jumps right there. I can just dismiss the Find Dialogue with a quick Command W and I'm where I need to be. If I were to jump to Chapter 3 I can easily do that as well, or in this case it takes me to Chapter 30. But I still have the Find Dialogue open. I press Return and it's going to find each one and Shift Return will go to the previous one. So I can pretty quickly get to where I want. This works great in Numbers documents too. I can do a quick Command F and then Search like that and you can see it jumps to right where it finds that text. This works great in Preview as well. A quick  Command F takes me to the Search field here at the top right. I can type, you know, Chapter 8 like that. Notice how it gave me a list of results here on the left. So if I were to type, say, Chapter 3 you can see I see 3 30 31 and so on. So I could always now use the down arrows and you can see how it goes through this list of results. 

This is a really important technique to use on a long webpage like this. You can do Command F and you're doing a Find on the page. So you can Search for something that you want to find. You can see how I've got all the matches here. I've got these little buttons. I can go through the matches like that to jump to different parts of the page. Or I can just keep pressing return and it goes to the next one. Shift Return goes to the previous one. 

Now some apps have some special ways to jump around in them. You can imagine Preview, an app specifically designed for you to be able to go and quickly navigate through a PDF, has a lot of these. So, for instance, you've got under the Go Menu a Go To Page, which is option Command G, and you can type a page number here. So, Option Command G 30 takes me to page 30. In addition to that you have a variety of sidebars here. You can use Thumbnails. As soon as you bring up Thumbnails you see how one of the pages is selected. Now the Up and Down Arrows will actually go through the pages here on the left. So you could navigate by real page, not just by the visible section on the screen, which is what page up and page down does to get around in the document. You don't have to use the Master Trackpad at all to get to this. So, I can hide the sidebar. Under View you've got the ability to bring up Thumbnails. Option Command 2. Note that you also have Option Command 3 here, which brings up a Table of Contents. If the document has a Table of Contents then doing this will bring that up and you can see this has chapters. I can use the arrow keys, now, to navigate from chapter to chapter. If I do Option Command 2 to bring up Thumbnails I can now navigate page by page all without ever having to use my mouse or Trackpad. 

Pages also has a sidebar here. Unfortunately there are no keyboard shortcuts by default at least to bring up the Page Thumbnails like that. But once you have them and you select one, you can use the arrow keys to move by real pages through the document. 

So I hope this video gave you some ideas about how to quickly navigate through documents using your keyboard, whether you're editing documents in Pages or Numbers or just reading them in Preview or on the Web. These can be really useful techniques to know. Thanks for watching.