I made a tool called HandyRef with VBA that provides a handy way to insert Cross Reference in MS Word, just like copy and paste. "Copy" what you want to reference and "paste" it at the point where cross reference is needed. HandyRef abandons the long list for selecting reference items that MS Word uses and greatly speeds up the cross-reference process. HandyRef provides Ribbon and keyboard shortcut for the user. Picture below shows the Ribbon that integrated in MS Word "Reference" Ribbon tab. By the way, HandyRef is open-source. Details and code can be found at
Github