8 Microsoft Word Tips You Probably Don’t Know

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8 Microsoft Word Shortcuts You Probably Don’t Know
By Becky Worley | Upgrade Your Life – 14 hrs ago

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6. Quick Parts

This next tip builds on what the Autotext function did in older versions of Word: If you have a certain paragraph of text you regularly need to add to a document — like a boilerplate disclaimer, or maybe directions to your office — turn it into a Quick Part. Here's how:Quick Parts

  • Highlight the text you regularly use
  • Click the insert tab
  • Hit Quick Parts, and choose "Save Selection To The Quick Part Gallery"


Now any time you want to insert that chunk of text into a document, either a new one or and old one you're editing, just hit that Quick Parts button. Just one more click will select which saved Quick Part to insert. This trick will even work as a shortcut for adding a logo or letterhead.

7. Conform Fonts

This one used to drive me crazy: I'd copy and paste some bit of text from another document or from the Web, and then I'd have to click all over the place to get the font size and style to match the surrounding text of my existing document. No longer. Here's all you need to do: Highlight the non-conforming text, then hit Control-Spacebar. Done.

LINK
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I'll bet the people on this site know most of these shortcuts. Or maybe not. Anyway, that #7 tip will be quite useful to me. MS Word's cut-and-paste features leave a lot to be desired.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
#7 is just Microsoft's Format Painter, isn't it? Highlight the text format you want to copy, click this button:
formatpainter.png
and select the text you need to change.

If you need to change text in multiple places, double-click the painter button and select whatever text you want to reformat anywhere on your doc. It works across different docs, too, so if you have a header format you like in one doc, highlight it and click the button, go to your new doc and paint that format on whatever text you want changed, and then you can paint any other text with that format on that doc, too.

Format Painter is a universal feature in Office. I use it WAY more in Excel than in Word.

The Quick Parts trick might be something to play around with, but it seems from the description that I'll have to take hands off the keyboard and mouse-click something, whereas with AutoText I just type my shortcut and hit enter or space or whatever, and my word, phrase or paragraph pops in. I use AutoText A LOT, and the benefit to keeping your fingers on the keys is huge.

 
I rarely use Word but I live in Excel for work. Been using it for years and still find something new everyday or so

 
Since I hate removing my hands from the keyboard while typing, I wrote a simple little VBA macro that I execute with the key command ALT+Z that pastes whatever's in the Clipboard to the insertion point in the document - and formats it with the current formatting. If anyone is interested, here it is:

Code: 
Sub PasteUnformatted()
'
' PasteUnformatted Macro
'
'
   Selection.Collapse Direction:=wdCollapseStart
   Selection.PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText
End Sub
 
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