Like a Pro – How to Use Keyboard Shortcuts

If you’re a regular writer and you write a lot of text, you’ll really appreciate keyboard shortcuts in Word. Pro writers use every shortcut they can find to speed up the document management and as quality controls on their work. Think of it as your own home computer support service.



Shortcuts are great for all sorts of functions like formatting and saving a lot of grunt work trying to get your layouts right. If you’re handling large amounts of text, these shortcuts can literally save you hours of work in a week.



Why assign keyboard shortcuts to styles?



To show how effective shortcuts can be, a quick example:



You can customise your Microsoft Word by assigning some shortcut keys to commonly used paragraph styles like Heading 1, Heading 2, Body Text etc. If you’re a report or book writer, this is pure gold. It saves the irritating and repetitive process of manual formatting and you save time whenever you hit the shortcut.



This is a lot faster than typing a paragraph then trying to find the correct style in the word control ribbon, which to put it mildly is a bit less than entertaining when you’re in the middle of a job.

For example, to make something a "Heading 1", you can simply hit ALT+1 and then start typing.



Setting up keyboard shortcuts for Word is easy.



1. Right click on the Style entry for Heading 1 (or any other style) in the top ribbon of Word and select Modify Style from the menu that appears.

# A window appears that allows you to customise the appearance and properties of all the Heading 1’s across your entire document which is invaluable in large documents.

# To assign a keyboard shortcut, select Shortcut key from the drop down list in the bottom left corner.

# Now, press the shortcut keys you would like to use (in our case we assigned Alt+1). Note: If the combination of keys you’ve selected is available and not currently assigned to another program or shortcut, Unassigned will appear.

# Click Assign. This will permanently assign the shortcuts.