Fantastic Microsoft Word tricks

by Jen (August 15, 2007)

At the risk of being accused of cribbing another blog’s stuff, I’ve consolidated all the tips from WebWorkerDaily’s post on getting the most out of Microsoft Word, including the ones that commenters added after the post. I just think it would be so helpful to have them all in one place. Plus, I’ve made some little additions of my own.

• Jump right to where you left off editing when you re-open a Word doc with Shift + F5.
• Save all your open docs at once by holding down the Shift key when you open the file menu - choose “Save All”.
• Paragraph Hopping. Put your cursor at the beginning of a paragraph. Hold down the Shift and Alt keys together, then use the up and down arrow keys to “hop” the paragraph up or down in the document.
• Delete entire words by pressing Ctrl and Del together (with your cursor at the beginning of the word). Ctrl and Backspace do the same thing in reverse.
• Jump your cursor over entire words by pressing Ctrl + your left or right arrow keys. Jump entire paragraphs with Ctrl + your up or down arrows.
• Customize Line Spacing and Alignment. Ctrl + 1 provides single spacing, Ctrl + 2 provides double spacing and Ctrl + 5 provides 1-1/2 line spacing. Ctrl + R right aligns a paragraph, Ctrl + L left aligns one, CTRL + J justifies one and Ctrl + E centers one.
• Quick Selecting. Select all text between the current location of your cursor and the end of the current paragraph by hitting Ctrl + Shift and the down arrow. Also works in reverse: hold down Ctrl + Shift and use the up arrow to select everything up to the top of the paragraph.
• Undo as much as you want. If there’s a limit to how many times you can Ctrl + Z your way out of changes you’ve made, I don’t know what it is. If you change too much, Ctrl + Y lets you re-do what you undid.
• Alter font sizes on the fly. Press Ctrl and [ together to decrease size. Ctrl and ] will increase it.
• Change to subscript or superscript. Ctrl + “+” for subscript, and ctrl + shift + “+” for superscript.
• Change case by pressing shift + F3, which toggles through UPPER, lower and Sentence cases.
• Change to small caps with ctrl+shift+k.
• Cut and paste formatting by pressing Control + Shift + C to copy the formatting and styles from a section. Select the text you want to apply that formatting to and press Control + Shift + V.

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