Microsoft Word is a program we all spend a great deal of time in. And if you think about it, most of your time in that program is spent with your hands on the keyboard. The more you move your hands from your keyboard to your mouse and back, the less productive you are. Keyboard short cuts are the answer to increase your productivity.
Microsoft Word has a large pile of keyboard shortcuts to dang near do anything without ever taking your hands off the keyboard. We’ve talked about the foreign language shortcuts before, but here are a pile of other short cuts that might be useful for you:
- Ctrl+O: Open
- Ctrl+S: Save
- Ctrl+W: Close
- Ctrl+X: Cut
- Ctrl+C: Copy
- Ctrl+V: Paste
- Esc: Cancel
- Ctrl+Z: Undo
- Ctrl+Y: Re-do
- Ctrl+A: Select all
- Ctrl+B: Bold
- Ctrl+I: Italic
- Ctrl+U: Underline
- Ctrl+[: Decrease font size 1 point
- Ctrl+]: Increase font size 1 point
- Ctrl+E: Center text
- Ctrl+L: Left align text
- Ctrl+R: Right align text
- Ctrl+J: Aligns the selected text or line to justify the screen.
- Ctrl+K: Insert a hyperlink.
- Ctrl+T: Create a hanging indent.
- Ctrl+Shift+L: Quickly create a bullet point.
- Ctrl+Shift+F: Change the font.
- Ctrl+End: Moves the cursor to the end of the document.
- Ctrl+Home: Moves the cursor to the beginning of the document.
- Ctrl+Spacebar: Reset highlighted text to the default font.
- Ctrl+Left Arrow: Moves one word to the left.
- Ctrl+Right Arrow: Moves one word to the right
- Alt+Left Arrow: Go back one page
- Alt+Right Arrow: Go forward one page
- Alt+W, Q, then tab in Zoom dialog box to the value you want: Zoom
- Ctrl+=: Apply subscript formatting (automatic spacing)
- Ctrl+Shift+*: View or hide non printing characters.
- Alt, F, A (or F12): Save As
- Alt, W, R: Show/Hide Ruler
This is by no means a complete list. Microsoft has a lot more that might be useful, depending on how you use Word and the types of documents you work on.