I do this, then scroll up or down in the font list and the display changes as you scroll. But I'll admit it takes a while to get through the list.

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I use the Font Thing, a free program. I save all of the new fonts I find into a separate folder called scrapbook fonts. Good thing is you can view those that are installed and that are not installed. You can select the multiple tab and view a ton of fonts at the same time. You can write in your phrase you want to see. Best part of all is for those that are not installed...."you never have to install them". Just have Font Thing opened...and your other program...PSP, WORD, whatever.....and as long as Font Thing is open, you can see all of the uninstalled fonts in your program. Try it, it works. They will all show up in your pull down select box. An alternate way, if you just want to look at one font, or use one uninstalled font, is just go to start, right click explore, go your your font folder and click on it to open it - as long as it's open, you'll be able to select it in PSP, WORD, whatever program you want too cool. YA GOTTA TRY IT. IT'S WONDERFUL. Of course, I first learned about in on this site a few months back.

and not all programs offer it. Believe it or not it stands for "what you see is what you get."
You've actually struck upon a clever solution, to open Word. I do that more now with PSE 3 because there's lots of stuff word can help me with, but I had never thought to toggle back and forth for fonts...I just keep the layer active.

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You should defintely just use a 3rd party font viewer to organize and view your fonts. I use a program called printers apprentice and what I like about it is I can not only see my fonts in whatever text I'd like.... I can activate/deactivate only the ones I'm going to use for that session. Most users will just activate all their fonts.. 10,000 is one users case! Every time you turn on/off your PC and load/unload your software, the PC must load all those fonts into memory!! Imagine how long this takes and what a waste of memory... better to just view the fonts in a 3rd party application and then jjust turn on/off the ones you want to use.

By the way.. the new Photoshop CS2 will have a font viewer built in.. but I'll still use a 3rd party.. Good luck!

Is FontThing available for Win? I only see Mac versions....