Quality-of-Life Keyboard Shortcuts for MS Word
In a previous blog post, I talked about avoiding the mouse trap: keeping those fingers and forearms healthier by navigating your computer with your keyboard, all the while become a happier and more efficient desk jockey. With some of the same motivations, I turn now to highlight keyboard-based shortcuts that you can use to help you navigate MS Word and its functions.
I work in Word, so this is the software I know best, but I should say that other word processors offer much of the same functionality — I can’t speak to the extent of the overlap, but I know it exists. As such, if you’re working with other software but you spot something here that seems useful in your context, I encourage you to practice your Google-fu to see what you can import.
Alt: MS Word will show you the way
First, I should say that MS Word — for all of its misbehavin’ — is smartly set up to take you from having zero knowledge of keyboard navigation to having as much knowledge as is immediately useful to you in Word, be that much or little.
A simple, kaleidoscopic keystroke will put far more functionality at your fingertips than I could cover in a brief blog post: With a Word document open, press Alt. Profit.
When you hit Alt, letters will overlay your basic functions (see image below).
Press the appropriate alphabetical key(s), and you’ll be taken to the next layer of the menu. Repeat until you’ve accessed your desired function.
Let’s say I want to change font size without touching my mouse. Well, that’s as simple as Alt, H, F, S, numeral. Change your view of the “track changes” function? Alt, R, T, D, arrow keys, Enter. And so on, ad inifinitum. Word will lead you.
Whomever you are and whatever your need for MS Word, this overlay system will allow you to beat down a mnemonic path to your most-used functions through keyboard navigation alone, and I would bet five Canadian dollars and half a Boston cream doughnut that it won’t take long before you’re saving some time.
6 quality-of-life keyboard shortcuts in MS Word
As an addendum to the above power-house tip, I humbly offer six further steps you can take to improve your quality of life by harnessing more of the potential of your keyboard.
1. Set shortcuts for your Quick Access Toolbar. Your Quick Access Toolbar comprises a set of icons that can be accessed with the miracle of Alt, as described above. I mention this toolbar separately because almost any Word function can be moved to it, making it an easily customizable storehouse for your favourites: Grasping your mouse every so briefly, right click on the button for the function (e.g., the button “New Comment,” under the “Review” tab), and click “Add to Quick Access Toolbar.”
Once you’ve added the function to the toolbar, the corresponding button will appear at the top of your screen. Access the function by pressing Alt and then the numeral that overlays the button (see, e.g., the numerals across the top of the page in the above image). To add a comment, for example, I hit Alt, 4. This shortcut is only slightly more efficient than the native MS Word route of Alt-based shortcuts — Alt, R, C — but it’s more comfortable for the hand.
2. Skip through chunks of text with Ctrl + ↑, ↓, ←, →, Backspace, Delete. With Ctrl + ↑ and ↓(arrow keys), jump from paragraph to paragraph. With Ctrl + ← and →, skip entire words at a time. With Ctrl + Backspace or Delete, excise entire words as a time. These shortcuts save key-mashing and finger strain.
3. Open the styles menu with Ctrl + Alt + Shift + S . The styles menu offers fairly advanced functionality, but it’s great to access when you need to change a setting to apply throughout a certain component of the document.
For example, you might change the font and font size of all headings within a certain level. Or you might face the problem of a document whose commenting language settings are not in the language in which you’re writing (this happens commonly in my work). I’m writing in English, but the proofing language for the comments is set to German, say, because the author is German. When I want to spellcheck my comments, I could change the commenting language for each comment individually (clearly a drag on my time), but with this styles-menu shortcut and a little bit of knowhow, I can instead change the commenting language for all comments at once.
4. Spellcheck with Alt + F7. Access a faster version of spellcheck with almost all of the same functionality. Use the arrow keys to navigate the menu that pops up, and remember that you can hit the underlined letter in any word in the menu to execute that command (e.g., A for “Add to Dictionary”).
5. Word search and advanced word search with Ctrl + F and Ctrl + H. While Ctrl + F is an excellent tool even in web browsers and the like, Ctrl + H opens MS Word’s advanced search window, which lets you access functions such as find-and-replace.
6. Set case sensitivity for your search. The difference between sensitivity to capital letters in a search and insensitivity to capital letters in a search can be hundreds of hits. Often, when I’m checking for consistent use of acronyms in a document, for example, I need to search two- or three-letter acronyms composed of letters that appear in common words. Say I’m using Ctrl + F to check the usage of “POS” (i.e., “point of sale”) throughout a document; unless I make the search case sensitive, in searching “POS” I’m going to have to navigate past each instance of “possible” and any other “pos–” word in the document. To avoid this kind of bloat in my searches through an acronym-heavy document, I toggle this setting dozens of times before I’m finished.
Case sensitivity can be toggled in a few keystrokes, luckily: Ctrl + F, Tab, Alt + ↓, O, H, Enter. (This Word shortcut draws on some of the tips I offered in my previous article, so if you’re curious about how it works, see here).
