If you’re like me, you spend more time in Microsoft Word than any other software application. Those hours really add up, as I’ve mentioned before, and that’s why it’s good to constantly collect tips on how to be more efficient in Word. In this post, I’ll round up several good ones.
Save ‘Em All. If you, as I do, often have a lot of Word documents open at the same time, it helps to know how to save them all at once. To quickly 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.
Repeat Your Formats. If you want to apply formats 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. This can save a great deal of time when editing documents that have multiple types of formats repeating themselves.
Move Paragraphs Around Quickly. Hit CTRL+E, CTRL+L, or CTRL+R to center, left-align or right-align a paragraph. I often use this just to eyball how paragraphs might look when in a different order.
Deja Vu. When you take a break, and you want to have your cursor sitting right where you left it in an editing session, you don’t have to leave your document open. Instead, close it and when you reopen it to resume editing, hit Shift+F5 to take your cursor back to precisely where you were.
Undo Again. Many Word users are familiar with using Ctrl + Z to undo the last change that was made to a document, but did you know you can serially undo the last several changes you made? Just keep hitting Ctrl + Z to do so.
Fast Select. You can 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.
Do you know of any good tips or tools for Microsoft Word?
Thanks, I learned a few new shortcuts from your post.
These are the most helpful for me:
Ctrl + shift + 8 will toggle the field codes and markups.
Ctrl + alt + I will mark citations, very helpful if you are creating multiple concordances or TOC’s.
Shift + F7, when the cursor is on a word, will highlight that word and automatically look it up in the thesaurus.
Ctrl + shift + S will save as, very helpful if you want to save a version of your current document or want to save it to say your flash drive.
Rather than holding the right or left arrow to move along a line letter by letter, hold Ctrl and press the arrow to jump word by word. Much quicker! (Hold shift too and the text will be selected.
Also, select some text and Ctrl – [ or ] to change the size of the text quickly.
Jon
I work in a lega setting and used Word Perfect for many years. It was designed for legal applications – MSWord is not. Where I am now, there is only MS Word and after 5 years, I’m still stumbling around. I appreciate all the help I can get. Thanks for the great tips!
One of the greatest time-savers in Word is the use of Styles. It simplifies formatting (making most formatting decision-free), ensures consistency, reduces the possibility of corruption, etc. Some people seem to resist using styles like it’s a foreign language, but it’s truly the most powerful tool Word offers and the one that can save the most time!
@MikeR: I completely agree with you. If someone takes a few minutes to get used to using styles then they will find that they are a time-saving tool that will save you a ton of time and headaches when formatting.
Well, you could also have a look here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290938/en-us to see them all ;-)
Blatant plug – a few more Word lifesavers: http://dnutley.wordpress.com/word/