Ms Word tips

Where Was I? I get up and walk around frequently when I’m writing—gets the blood flowing. Sometimes I close a document I am editing, and when I come back to it and open it up, I just hit Shift + F5 to return to the exact place in the document where I was editing.

Serial Saves. If you’re like me, you often have many documents open at once. For safety’s sake, I like to frequently save all of them at once. To do this, hold down the Shift key when you go to the File menu. This changes Save to Save All.

Paragraph Hopping. You can circumvent the multi-step process of cutting, pasting and deleting to move paragraphs with an easy paragraph hopping feature. Often when I’m writing, I decide that a given paragraph would work better above or below another one. Do this: Go into a document with several paragraphs and put your cursor at the beginning of one of the middle paragraphs. Hold down the Shift and Alt keys in unison, then use the up and down arrow keys to “hop” the paragraph to new positions in the document.

One Fell Swoop Word Deletion. You can delete entire words with your keyboard. Just put your cursor at the beginning of the word and press Ctrl and Del together. This is very useful when editing.

Customize Line Spacing and Alignment. The Ctrl key is your best buddy when you want to experiment with line spacing and alignment variations. Ctrl + 1 provides single spacing, Ctrl + 2 provides double spacing and Ctrl + 5 provides 1-1/2 line spacing. Ctrl + R right aligns a paragraph, Ctrl + L left aligns one, and Ctrl + E centers one.

Quick Selecting. 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.

 

Ctrl + [ or ], de- or increases the font of the selected text with 1 point.

 

Ctrl + “+” for subscript and ctrl + shift + “+” for superscript

 

Shift + F3 changes the case of selected text — UPPER — lower — Sentence case.

 

After ctrl-Z you can step back your changes by using Ctrl Y.

 

Press Control + Shift + C to copy the formatting and styles.

 

Select the location of the text where the formatting and style needs to be applied, and then
Press Control + Shift + V to paste the style and formatting (including Colors, Fonts, Font sizes, Paragraph styles, Headings and everything else).

Microsoft Keyboard Shortcuts

Source

Removing Extra Lines in MS Word

you’ll sometimes find that there are extraneous blank lines between paragraphs getting in the way. This happens frequently when text is pasted in from another source, such as an ASCII file or an e-mail, where it is common practice to hit enter twice between paragraphs (as opposed to indenting the first line of each paragraph). In a Word, however, those extra lines are not only unnecessary, but they are intrusive. The paragraph formatting options in Word allow for refined control of inter-paragraph spacing, paragraph indentation, and so on.

When working on an MS Word documentIn the example shown above, we have Word automatically inserting a 6pt spacer above each paragraph plus a 3pt spacer below (for a total of 9pts between paragraphs, which is slightly shorter than a typical text line containing a 10pt font with room for dissenters). The problem is that Word will treat a blank line as an entire paragraph, so we actually end up with about 30pt worth of spacing between paragraphs. Not good.

If there’s only a handful of such blank lines, then it’s no problem to simply place the cursor on each blank line, one at a time, and hit the delete key. But what if these extraneous blank lines go on for 50 pages?

In Word, every paragraph ends with a special paragraph mark, and it turns out that you can perform a search-and-replace on these paragraph marks just as if they were regular text. Normally these paragraph marks are invisible, but you can make them appear by clicking on the button with the paragraph symbol (¶) in the toolbar. Click on the button a second time to render them invisible again. (Note: the paragraph symbols do not need to be visible in order to perform a search and replace against them. I just wanted to show you how to make them visible in case you were curious.)

In the search/replace dialog, the notation that refers to a paragraph symbol is ^p (the caret symbol, followed by a lower case P). Don’t worry if you can’t remember this code. Simply click on the More/Less button to expand the dialog box, then click on the special button, and select Paragraph Mark. It will automatically type the ^p for you (into either the Find What, or Replace With, whichever had focus last).

Now, here’s the tricky part. You might think that, in order to delete the blank lines, you’d want to set Find What to ^p, leave Replace With blank, and click the Replace All Button. That will certainly delete the paragraph marks on those blank lines, effectively removing the blank lines, but it will also delete the paragraph marks at the end of the legitimate paragraphs. So, you’d end up with your entire document being one huge paragraph.

Instead, set Find What to ^p^p, and set Replace With to ^p. This tells Word that anywhere it sees two paragraph marks together, with nothing in between them, to replace them with a single paragraph mark — which has the net effect of leaving the first paragraph mark alone while deleting the second one. Note that if your file has multiple blank lines between paragraphs, then you’ll have to click the Replace All button repeatedly to eventually collapse all of the blank lines to nothing.

Now, say instead that the source material did not have blank lines between paragraphs but did indent the first line of each paragraph by five spaces. Here again, those spaces would interfere with the paragraph formatting. To delete those leading spaces, open the search and replace dialog, set Find What to ^p followed by five spaces, and set Replace With to ^p. After clicking on the Replace All button, any paragraph that is followed by another paragraph where the first five characters are spaces, those spaces will be removed. (Note: This counts on you knowing that the paragraphs with leading spaces begin with exactly 5 spaces. If you are unsure of the number of spaces, or if the number varies, then just have this search and replace dialog find ^p followed by a single space (still replacing it with ^p alone). Then, keep clicking on the Replace All button repeatedly until Word reports that it made zero replacements.

Using MS Word’s Search & Replace on Formatting

Did you know that in Microsoft Word, it is possible to do a search and replace on the formatting of text? For example, say that you’ve been given a bibliography that has all of the book titles in bold, but proper form is for book titles to be in italics. Using the search and replace function, it’s easy to change all of the bold text to italics in one fell swoop.

1. Highlight the section of text to be affected (if not the whole document).
2. Bring up the search and replace tool (Ctrl+H).
3. Click on the More button to reveal the formatting options.
4. Click in the Find What box, so that it has focus (there should be a flashing cursor there).
5. Click on the Format button, and select Font…
   
   
6. Select Bold (or whatever format you’re trying to change from).
7. Click in the Replace With box, so that it now has focus.
8. Click on the Format button, and again select Font…
9. Select Italics (or whatever format you’re trying to change to).
10. Click on Replace All

Changing fonts is just the tip of the iceberg. This technique can be used with any sort of formatting (paragraphs, styles, etc.)  Also, be sure to click on the Special button to see the options that are available there (Any Digit, Any Letter, etc.)  These wildcards and special symbols (along with plain text) can be used in combination with the formatting criteria.  For example, it’s possible to change all negative numbers to red this way, by specifying the Find What as a minus sign followed by the Any Digit notation and by specifying the Replace With as nothing but with a font color of red.

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