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Word 2010 Videos - Finding Existing Documents

Word Recent Documents

There are several different ways of finding existing Word documents on your computer. One convenient way is by using the Recent Items list on the Windows 7 Start Menu. If we click on the Start button, and then hover over the Word 2010 icon, we can see a list of recently opened documents. To open one, we just click on it. Let's just close this down.

The space is limited on the Recent Items list, and as you work on more and more documents you'll find that this list will fill up, and eventually the older documents will just drop off this list.

Pinning Documents To The Recent Documents List

However, there is a way to keep important documents pinned to this list. If we hover over a particular document, we can see a Pin to this list button over on the right. If we click on this button, then this document will stay pinned to the top of the list, regardless of how big the list gets.

To unpin the document, we just go back to the list - there it is at the top - and just click on the Unpin from this list button. And it's just like all the other documents in that list now.

There is another Recent Documents list, and that's found in Word itself (it's not handled by Windows). If we click on the File tab, and then click on Recent, here it is. The same principle applies with the Pin to this list button.

Searching For Word Documents

If you haven't worked on a document recently, so it doesn't appear on either of those Recent Documents lists, then you can search for it. We'll do that from Backstage View, where we are at the moment. If we click on Open, we can either navigate our file structure like we would do using Windows Explorer, or we can search for it using the search box here.

So, let's just search for that one. And to open the document, we would either select it and click on Open, or just double click it.

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