A few nifty keyboard shortcuts (Word, all recent versions)

Everybody loves keyboard shortcuts! They allow us to automate our work and accomplish tasks easily and quickly. So here are a few of my favorite keyboard shortcuts in Word. The ones I’ve posted here work in all recent versions, from Word 2007 back through Word 97 and possibly even earlier. I’m presenting them in no particular order.

Ctrl F6 — cycles through all open documents.

Shift F5 — puts the cursor back at the last editing position.

F7 — runs the Spell-Checker.

Ctrl H — Find and Replace. Note that you can use this dialog to find and replace formatting marks as well as characters, words, and phrases.

Ctrl M — indents the paragraph your cursor is in from the left. Each time you press Ctrl M, the paragraph is indented one additional tab stop. To decrease the indent by one tab stop at a time, press Ctrl Shift M.

Ctrl T — creates a hanging indent. Works like Ctrl M in that each time you press that key combination, the indent increases by one tab stop. Ctrl Shift T decreases the indent.

Ctrl Q — removes (from the paragraph your cursor is in) all paragraph formatting that you applied via the Paragraph dialog. That includes alignment, indentation, line spacing, before and after spacing, line and page breaks (such as Widow/Orphan settings), and tabs. In effect, Ctrl Q restores the default paragraph format.

Ctrl Shift * — displays the non-printing characters (spaces inserted by pressing the space bar, tabs, paragraph symbols, end-of-cell markers in tables, etc.). Press Ctrl Shift * a second time to hide the non-printing characters.

Ctrl Delete — deletes the word to the right of the cursor. (The cursor must be on the first letter of the word.)

Ctrl Backspace — deletes the word to the left of the cursor. (The cursor must be to the right of the last letter of the word.)

I’ll post additional Word keyboard shortcuts, as well as selected WordPerfect shortcuts, soon.