Comment 1 by jteh on 2014-03-20 16:22
As a work around, if you use Draft view, Word doesn't skip over text in other columns.

Comment 2 by Sukil (in reply to comment 1) on 2014-03-20 16:35
Replying to jteh:

As a work around, if you use Draft view, Word doesn't skip over text in other columns.

I didn't know this, thanks for the info. However, I think something should be implemented, or perhaps a notice in the wiki about this.

While my usage of Microsoft Office (especially word) is restricted mostly to academics and I have had to do little with multi-column documents, an online course I was once sort of part of (Whizjuniors was its name, in case anyone was wondering which course) had working with multi-column documents as one of initial and basic parts of a word processor. This observation, coupled with the fact that this has been brought up on Github several times as well as probably on the NVDA Users list some times, seems to imply that this lack of support is adversely impacting many since it sounds like multi-column documents are an integral part of more advanced word processing or corporate environments. Taking the work-around shared by @jcsteh in #3995 (comment) into account, @Qchristensen, could you please enlighten us about the significance of the requested feature for an average NVDA user using Microsoft Word, so that we may better evaluate the importance of this ticket itself?

This is implemented now; see #6536. Closing.