12 Time-Saving Tips for Microsoft Word
February 21st, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 14 Comments
Despite the availability of many excellent, free word processors many of us still spend most of our writing time in Microsoft Word. It tends to be the most compatible tool you can choose to exchange documents with others, and lots of people are even forced to use it by dictatorial IT departments. In this post, I’ll round up some good tips that can make you more productive and save you lots of time in Word.
Paste Your Formats. If you want to apply your formatting and styles for a given paragraph or document to a new paragraph or document, hit Ctrl+Shift+C to copy, select the text you want to apply the formatting to, then hit Ctrl+Shift+V. Colors, fonts, styles and all other formatting will be applied.
Take me Back. If you need to step away from a document but want to have your cursor sitting right where you left it in the middle of an editing session when you return, you don’t have to leave your document open. Go ahead and close it. When you reopen it to resume editing, hit Shift+F5 to take your cursor back to precisely where you were.
Select a Whole Document. To select an entire document for copying or deletion, hit Ctrl+A.
Experiment with Paragraph Placement. Often, one paragraph or another in a document might work better above or below its current location. You don’t have to cut and paste to move paragraphs around. Just hold down the Shift and Alt keys together, then use the up and down arrow keys to move the paragraph around in the document.
More Paragraph Shuffling. Hit CTRL+E, CTRL+L, or CTRL+R to center, left-align or right-align a paragraph.
Create a Line. To create a horizontal line across the width of a document, as you might do to separate one part of a document from another, hit the hyphen key three times and then hit Enter.
Save Many Documents at Once. Do you have eight Word documents open and need to take a break? To rapidly save all open documents, hold down the Shift key and go to Word’s File menu. The usual Save menu choice will show up as Save All.
Rapid-Fire Sentence Jettison. Hold down the Ctrl key when you click on any sentence to highlight the whole sentence, then hit Delete. While you’re at it, click three times in rapid succession in any paragraph to select the whole thing, then hit delete if you want it gone.
Rapid-Fire Word Jettison. Double click your mouse on any word in a document to select it, then hit Delete.
Rapid-Fire Table Jettison. To quickly get rid of a table, select it and hit backspace.
Beginnings and Endings. Hit Ctrl+Home or Ctrl+End to go to the beginning or end of a document.
Subscript or Superscript? Hit Ctrl+ when you have a word, sentence or paragraph selected for subscript. Hit Ctrl, Shift+ for superscript.
Do you have any good Word tips?
14 Comments Post your own comment
rossgoodman says: February 21st, 2008 11:55pm
Excellent, thanks for that.
I am in no way a touch typist but I prefer to use keyboard short cuts where I can. I am fairly adept at using windows it’s self using the keyboard but I had only found a few of the Word short cut keys that you mentioned.
Ross
http://www.RossGoodman.com
Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK » (Slightly belated) Thursday Tip Day: Tips for Microsoft Word says: February 22nd, 2008 2:00am
[...] VOIP phone extension modules (which I can do, if there’s enough interest…) along comes this article from Web Worker Daily full of useful tips for Microsoft Word. No news yet as to how many of them [...]
Crowdstormer says: February 22nd, 2008 5:43am
Thanks for the tips! Any gems for Open Office Writer as well? I find it much less good than Word, but have to use it for work often.
» Blog Archive » links for 2008-02-23 says: February 22nd, 2008 4:46pm
[...] 12 Time-Saving Tips for Microsoft Word « Great tips for Word power users (tags: how-to microsoft tips tools) [...]
Le scorciatoie da tastiera per Microsoft Word per risparmiare tantissimo tempo - Geekissimo says: February 23rd, 2008 1:00am
[...] Fonte: Web Worker Daily [...]
bligoo says: February 23rd, 2008 7:21am
The “paste your format” tip is simply excelent. I wish I knew it years ago. I am going to look if it works also in Power Point…. Other tips I often use
- Well known ctrl + Z and Crtl + Y for undo and redo actions
- crtl + M & Crtl + T for text indent
Freelance Writing Jobs » Blog Archive » Weekend Link Love says: February 24th, 2008 6:20am
[...] 12 Time Saving Tips for Microsoft Word at Web Worker Daily. [...]
skysong1330 says: February 24th, 2008 11:16am
ctrl+1 makes the selection single-spaced, ctrl+2 makes it double spaced, and ctrl+5 makes it 1.5 spaced.
GTD Power Links 02-25-08 « Geeks Guide To GTD says: February 25th, 2008 12:59am
[...] Microsoft Word time saving tips…”Often, one paragraph or another in a document might work better above or below its current location. You don’t have to cut and paste to move paragraphs around. Just hold down the Shift and Alt keys together, then use the up and down arrow keys to move the paragraph around in the document.” (via web workers daily) [...]
Stacy says: February 25th, 2008 6:17am
Those are some great tips. I have saved myself a lot of time in memorizing some of the keyboard shortcuts and applying them. I’m a fast typer and moving up to the menus can really slow me down.
Business Hacks mobile edition says: February 26th, 2008 6:00am
[...] wouldn’t it be great if you could spend less time using it? Web Worker Daily offers 12 time-savers for Microsoft Word, starting with this one: Paste Your Formats. If you want to apply your formatting and styles for a [...]
Darren says: February 28th, 2008 10:59am
The right thing to do is to use Styles in the first place. It’s one of those things — like using version control — that seems like a lot more work, when it’s really a lot less. Learn about styles, use them. Want to apply your carefully-crafted font, border, and paragraph settings to a paragraph? Put your cursor there, and select the style from the styles sidebar or dropdown. Poof.
The big gain, though, comes in changing the style itself. If you write documentation, say, and you have a style called “code example” — and you decide that your code examples should use Consolas instead of Courier one day. If you used the style, all you have to do is edit the style itself, and all your code examples’ formats will change.
Saves a lot of time in formatting documents for submission, too…
Link update - 29/02/08 « Curiously Persistent says: February 29th, 2008 2:24am
[...] 12 time saving tips for MS Word (Web Worker Daily list) [...]
12 sneltoetsen voor MS Word » lifehacking.nl says: April 21st, 2008 2:55am
[...] dank aan Web Worker Daily, foto: Steve Keys) Stem of voeg toe(?): Comment RSS [...]