If you use the Navigation Pane only for searching, then this works for me, hopefully for you too:


1. By default, Ctrl+F should be set to "SmartFind" (that's the command name) in Word.
2. Go to View tab, and in the Show section uncheck the option Navigation Pane.
3. Now your documents will open without the navigation pane but every time you press Ctrl+F navigation pane will open and go automatically to Results (with the cursor in place).
amadís

Thanks Amadis for settling that, even tho such a long time ago.
You know there are so many queries out there abut this issue and most of the replies have simply not understood the question: by "default setting of navigation page" we did not mean whether it is on the LH side of the page or not, nor any other of the weird things people have replied to, meaninglessly: we meant, how we can do a word or phrase Search in a document without getting this absurd "Navigation Pane" starting us off with the irrelevant "headings" rather than "results", which is what used to happen automatically before some update.