MS Word: Reclaiming Ctrl-PageDown for "Next Page" after a "Find"

Have you ever noticed that you lose the use of Ctrl-PageDown in Word, for doing "next page", if you do a "find"? Very frustrating. I found the answer.

If you're a keyboard fan like me (prefering keyboard shortcuts over mousing around), you may then know that you can use Ctrl-PageDown to move forward to the top of the next page. This is useful if you're reviewing a document and need to view it by page (rather than just using PageDown to scroll a screen at a time).

But then you may have been as frustrated as me to find that if if you do a "find" (Ctrl-F or Edit>Find), this then unexpectedly coopts the Ctrl+PageDown keystroke to become a "repeat find". Grr. What's worse, there's no apparent way to reclaim that keystroke's original purpose other than to close Word (you can't even just close the current document, if you have multiples, as the stored find text is available for use across all open documents). And if you try to reopen the Find dialogue, you can't do anything to wipe out the find text to "undo" this behavior. I've suffered this for years and finally sent out a plea to some lists for any thoughts.

Thank goodness for the kindness of friends! A colleague, Douglas Smith, of Automated Creations, Inc, showed me that it IS possible to reclaim the "next page" feature. He observed that if you do a "go to page" action (Ctrl-G or Edit>Goto), this somehow clears outlook's hold on the Ctrl-PageDown for doing a repeat find, reclaiming it for "next page". Hoo-ray! Thanks, Douglas!

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