In this article, we’ll learn some things to make your life with Microsoft Word easier. I’m a big fan of shortcut keys because I don’t have to move my hands from the keyboard to the mouse to do simple, basic tasks. I also like to take advantage of Word’s power. Here are a few of my favorites.
Perhaps the most important shortcut you can memorize and use is control-s, the save command. Hold the ‘ctrl’ key down and then press ‘s’ to save your document. It does the same thing as clicking the disk icon on the toolbar and selecting the ‘save’ function on the ‘file’ menu. How often should you press ctrl-s? Early and often!
One of the most powerful time-savers in Word is the AutoCorrect function. You type a few letters, press the space bar and Word substitutes what you’ve set up in AutoCorrect for those few letters. This is a boon for those words you have to type repeatedly like your company name, your own name, and common business terms. It’s also a winner for those words that are often mistyped - did you ever notice that Word changes ‘teh’ to ‘the’ for you? That’s AutoCorrect at work. Let’s learn how to do it!
In the Tools menu, select AutoCorrect Options, then select the AutoCorrect tab. There, you can see the list of AutoCorrect words that Microsoft gives you out of the box. Scroll through the list so you know what’s there.
To add one of your own, type the shortcut in the box labeled “Replace” and the full text you want in the “With” box. Be careful what you choose as your shortcut. For example, if you make ‘cc’ mean ‘country club”, you’ll have trouble when you copy someone with cc: in Word!
When you’ve added a few shortcuts, press OK and try them! Here are a few that I have in my list:
- sys – system
- rpt – report
- ccl – County Clerk
- req – requirement
- reqs – requirements
- vty – Very Truly Yours,
- sele – selection
- rec – recommend
- recn – recommendation
Once you start using them, you’ll remember them all.
Here is a short list of keyboard shortcuts for often-used Word functions. Remember, Word gives you many ways to do the same thing: clicking icons on the tool bar, using the menus, and pressing function keys in conjunction with the alt, shift or ctrl keys. Here are some of my favorite shortcuts; select the text you want to affect and press (on a Mac, use the command key instead of control):
- ctrl-b: bold
- ctrl-i: italics
- ctrl-u: underline
- ctrl-z: undo
- ctrl-y: redo
- ctrl-q: remove paragraph formatting
- ctrl-c: copy
- ctrl-v: paste
- ctrl-x: cut
and some other shortcuts
- ctrl-s: save (but you know that one!)
- ctrl-a: select all the text in the document
- ctrl-e: center text
- shift-F3: toggle case
- ctrl-1: single space
- ctrl-2: double space
- ctrl-5: 1 ½ space
- ctrl-enter: page break
- ctrl-p: print
Enjoy your new-found timesavers.
