Want to know how to Create Keyboard Shortcuts in MS Word?

In MS Word you can assign frequently used commands to a keyboard shortcut. To create a shortcut, follow these steps:

1. Right-click in the toolbar area.

2. Select Customize and click the Keyboard button.

3. To auto fix a table’s content, highlight Table on the Categories list, and then click AutoFixContent in the Commands window.

4. Type the keyboard combination into the Press new shortcut key box.

5. Click Assign.

If this combination is already in use, Word will advise you to find another combination or replace an existing one.

Did this work for you?

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If you frequently need to insert a word, line or block of text into MS Word documents you can easily automate the process with a simple keyboard shortcut. 

Highlight the text and press Alt + F3, to create an AutoText entry, then give it a name or accept the default that appears in the dialogue box that appears and click OK. 

Now go to the Tools menu; select Customize and the Commands Tab. 

Click the Keyboard button then AutoText in the Categories window. 

Highlight your new entry in the Commands Window, click a cursor in the Press New Shortcut Key field, choose a key combination then click Assign. 

To remove an AutoText entry, go to the Insert menu, click AutoText, then AutoText, select the AutoText tab, highlight the entry and click Delete. 

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3. Save As Shortcut

This article explains various methods that you can use to minimize the amount of metadata in your Word documents. 

Whenever you create, open, or save a Word document, it creates metadata. Metadata is used for a variety of purposes to enhance the editing, viewing, filing, and retrieval of Office documents. Here are some examples of metadata that may be stored in your documents: 

• Your name 
• Your initials 
• Your company or organization name 
• The name of your computer 
• The name of the network server or hard disk where you saved the document 
• Other file properties and summary information
• Non-visible portions of embedded OLE objects 
• The names of previous document authors 
• Document revisions 
• Document versions 
• Template information 
• Hidden text
• Comments 

Metadata is created in a variety of ways in Word documents. As a result, there is no single method to remove all such content from your documents. The following sections describe areas where metadata may be saved in Word documents. 

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Have you ever forgotten your keyboard shortcuts? This often happens if you haven’t used them for a while or changed computers. The best thing to do is print out a list of all shortcuts on your machine.

It’s very easy: 

1. Go to File, Print.
2. In the Print What drop-down menu, select Key Assignments.
   

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Microsoft Word’s preview tool lets you view the contents of a document WITHOUT having to open it.
This is a terrific time saver, especially if all you want to do is look at the cover sheet of a large document. 

1. From the File menu, click Open.
2. Instead of opening the file, click the Views menu in the Open window pane.
    
3. Select Preview. This opens a preview pane which displays the contents of the document.
    
   

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Use this tip to automatically open the last document you worked on. This will save you time from having to go to the File menu and opening the document every time.

1. Right-click on an empty part of the desktop.
2. Select New, Create Shortcut.
3. In the ‘Type location of the item’ box, paste the following command.
   
   For Word 2000 use:
   “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\WINWORD.EXE” /mFile1 

   Word 2002:
   “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\winword.exe” /mFile1
    
   Word 2003:
   “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\winword.exe” /mFile1 

4. Click Next, and name the Shortcut, for example, Open Word.

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Microsoft Word lets you change and edit the icons on the toolbar.

Right-click onto an empty area of the toolbar and select Customize.

Right-click on the icon you want to change. Select either ‘Change button image’ or ‘Edit button image’.

Select a different icon or use the options to change its color and layout. 

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If you write a lot of documents, it’s easy to forget where you made your last edits. Instead of trying to find the last word you changed, you can use the Go Back feature. This automatically returns you to the last word you changed before the document was saved. 

To return to the last edit you made, press Shift + F5. 

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Use the =rand(x,y) trick to create dummy text or go to Lipsum.com and get dummy text there. 

FYI: if you’re going to use this on a regular basis, save it as an AutoText entry. 

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This trick is very useful if you insert pictures into your documents and need to position them accurately on the page.
Click on the horizontal ruler at the top of the page. This is the ruler that shows measurements from 1 to 20.
Press and hold down the left mouse button.
A vertical line appears. You can use this for adjusting the layout of images.  
While holding down the left button, press and hold down the right button.
The ruler changes to a set of precise measurements, which show the exact distance the vertical line is from the page margins.  
You may notice that this leaves a tab marker in the horizontal ruler. If you want to delete this, click on the tab and drag it off the page.

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 You have many options when printing in Word. As well as printing the current page only, or a range of pages, you can also tell Word to print an area in the document only. Word calls this a selection. 

So, for example, if you want to print the first paragraph of an Executive Summary, follow these steps:

1. Select the block of text that you want to print. 
2. Go to File, Print and in the Page range box, click Selection. 
3. Click OK. 

   Instead of printing the entire page, or set of pages, you’ll print this piece of text only. 

    

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 Underline spaces can very helpful if you want to tell the reader where to enter data, for example, type their name and address on an application form.
Name:                     
Address:                  
City:                      
The problem is that if you use a normal underline, it doesn’t work. The moment you type on it, the underline disappears. What you want is for the underline to remain where it is – even when you type onto it.
To create underlines that you can type on, follow these steps:
Press Ctrl + Shift + U and then press the Spacebar. This creates the underlines.
Type onto the underline. Notice that it doesn’t disappear.

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 Word lets you add words to its dictionary and to other custom dictionaries that you may have setup.

This is very handy if you’re using a lot of technical, business, or medical terms and want to avoid accepting them every time you run the spellchecker.
But, of course, you can also make mistakes when typing in these entries, which can then creep into your final draft. The spellchecker won’t find them because it thinks these are valid words.
Luckily it’s quite easy to update the dictionary and correct these errors.
Go to Tools, Options and select the Spelling and Grammar tab.
Click the Custom Dictionaries button.

Click Modify to open the Custom Dictionary.
Edit the list and Save when you’re finished.

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When writing long, complex documents, or writing a document over a number of days, you can get ‘snowblind’ and end up repeating text yourself without knowing it. 

Luckily there is a way to check that these repetitions don’t creep into your document. To find places where you may have repeating words, follow these steps: 

From the Edit menu, select Find and then open the Replace tab. 

In the Find box, enter the word you want to check.

In the Replace box, type ^& (press shift 6 to get the ^ character). This tells Word to find the word but not to replace it.    
Click Replace All. 

The results tell you how many times the word has been used. 

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Thought it’s not designed to do so, you can get Word to display text in mirror style. This works best if you want to have a heading or title written backwards, for example, to make a brochure or newsletter more interesting.

To write text backwards, what’s often called mirror writing, follow these steps:

Open the Drawing toolbar (View > Toolbars > Drawing) and click where you want the mirror text to appear

Click the WordArt icon (the large blue A) from the drawing toolbar.

Enter your text, select the font type and size, and click OK.

Click the Draw drop-down menu on the Drawing toolbar (extreme left of toolbar)

Select Rotate, Flip, or Flip Horizontal and you’ll get different types of backwards writing. 

Experiment with the settings to get the type of layout you want.

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