Do You Use These Word Shortcuts?

Like many of you, I use Word on a daily basis not just for work but at home as well.  And you may agree that banging away at the keyboard on a daily basis necessitates shorter navigational tactics.  But everyone knows the standard shortcuts for bold, italics, underline, copy, and paste, etcetera.  So as you type away on the first draft of your novel, the need for other shortcuts becomes necessary.  Don’t you agree?

Well, I decided to look into it and see what other shortcuts would be helpful when ideas are flowing and you want limited disruption in your typing.  These are some of the shortcuts that I have been using:

• CTRL+DELETE - This shortcut will delete an entire word.  Make sure the cursor is in front of the word you want to delete.

• ALT+SHIFT+F7 - This shortcut opens the Dictionary Pane.  This is very useful to have in addition to your favorite online Dictionary.

• SHIFT+F7 – This shortcut opens the Thesaurus Pane.  Another convenient and useful tool to have.

• F7 – This shortcut starts the Spell check.

• CTRL+A – This shortcut Selects All words in your document, which is great when you want to change the entire format, or do a word count, etc.

• CTRL+F – This shortcut is the Find Tool.  You can use it to find a word you need to either delete or replace.

• CTRL+N – This shortcut opens a new blank document, which is very helpful to use when you’re in the middle of a scene, and secondary characters begin to compete for attention.  You can easily open a new document, dump those chattery characters in there and go back to finish your scene.

• CTRL+F6 – This shortcut switches from one window to another.  So it’s easy to maneuver back and forth with minimal distraction.

There is an entire list of keyboard shortcuts for Word on the Microsoft Support page.

Mac users can refer to MacShortcuts.com or Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts for their list of shortcuts.

What shortcuts do you find useful?  Let us know in the comments.