Using Macbook Pro, OS 10.8.5, and Word 2011.

This may be an outdated topic and I apologize in advance if it's old news to the forum, but I recently upgraded from Snow Leopard and Word 2008 and immediately discovered two issues that negatively affect my primary workflow. This post addresses one of these discoveries and a solution.

My current project, for example, is a 150,000-word document with 38 chapters. In the past, I've relied on a two-page spread using the Print Preview function in Word 2008 to efficiently check the formatting of every page. Word 2011 doesn't include the ability to select that view. I searched online and found lots of forum discussions, but no solutions.

Just in case this might be of help to others, I found a method that is slightly less user friendly, but it serves my purposes very well.

I begin with File>Print or (Cmd+P). In the lower left corner of the print dialogue window is a drop-down PDF button. I clicked on that and selected "Open PDF in Preview."

Word creates a.pdf file that opens in a new window with a continuous scroll view. In the upper left corner of that window is a button with a drop-down menu. The bottom option is "Two Pages." You can also access it through the View menu option.

Selecting the two-page view initially doesn't appear to change anything because the window now contains only a single page. But when you press the keyboard right arrow, the view shifts to a two-page spread with pages 2 and 3.

These two pages are crammed into a window that previously displayed only one, but clicking and dragging the right lower corner of the window expands it to any size you want. You can also zoom in and out, which I typically don't use when my specific objective is to compare the formatting in two full pages side by side.

You can save this file and then open it with Adobe Reader and select the two-page view, which allows pages 1 and 2 to be shown together. View>Full Screen Mode (Cmd + L) switches to a single page at a time, which is handy for proofreading and looking for small errors in punctuation, etc.

Again, my apologies if this addresses an issue that others have long since solved, but from my searching yesterday, it didn't appear to me that anyone had used this method. Maybe it will help another author . . .

Tosh