Word Shortcuts to Maximize Efficiency (and Reduce Errors)

THE ABSOLUTE WORST CASE OF OFFICE INEFFICIENCY IS WRITING OUT AN ENTIRE SENTENCE OR EMAIL AND REALIZING YOUR CAPS LOCK WAS ON.  THE OLD WAY TO FIX THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN TO DELETE EVERYTHING AND START OVER.  Try this instead: to change the capitalization on a word or phrase, simply select the text by left-clicking your mouse and dragging it over the desired selection.  Once your text has been selected, press SHIFT+F3.  This finger combination will change case for text you selected from lower case, TO CAPITALS, To Capitalizing Only The First Letter In Each Word.

Note: Using caps lock doesn’t check for spelling errors, so write out your whole document with regular formatting, then change case.

Recently, a resume arrived to our offices with a note at the end stating “IMPECABLE REFERENCES PROVIDED.”  Word didn’t catch the typo most likely due to the fact that the author wrote it out with caps lock engaged.

Selecting text is a great way to format, change or delete large chunks of material in a flash.  Let’s say you have a document and you’d like to add headers to each paragraph.  Rather than selecting each header one by one and formatting them individually, select each header and format once by holding CTRL and highlighting the text by left-clicking your mouse and dragging it over the desired selection.  This function will allow you to select non-continuous chunks of your document.

To easily remove the formatting of text you’ve pasted or text you’ve formatted and decided to format differently, select the desired text and press CTRL+Space.  This will remove all formatting for the selected section of your document.  To format text according to your defaulted settings, press CTRL+SHIFT+N.  You can set your documents default settings by opening the font window (CTRL+D), selecting your preferences and clicking “Set as Default” in the lower left-hand corner of the pop up.  You can also set default preferences to your page layout by clicking on the Page Layout tab on your toolbar and setting defaults for Page Setup and Paragraph.  This is especially useful if your company abides by branding guidelines and each document you send out is the same.

For More Word Shortcuts, Read Part 2 Here