Revealed at Last: Keyboard Shortcut Secrets from MS Word

Posted on May 12, 2008 at 5:14 am

Keyboard secrets. Students used to trade them in college like a more sophisticated version of baseball cards. Microsoft Word has long been suspected of keeping an immense log of shortcut keys, written in longhand and available only to Bill Gates. This legend is slowly losing its cachet, however – it’s time to reveal at least a teaser on those fabled secret shortcut keys.

If the curious computer user has MS Word on his Windows PC or OS X Mac, he can pull together a printable list of all the keyboard functions in his word processor. This amazing feat can be accomplished with MS Word 97, 2000, 2002, or 2003 in Windows – MS Word X or Word 2004 will work on an OS X Mac.

Here are the quick and dirty clues to MS keyboard secrets. Click the “Tools” menu, then hit “Macros In.” Next step – pick “ListCommands” in “Macro Name.” Then, hit the “Run” button. When the “List Command” box appears, choose the “All Word Commands.” Click OK.

There it is…the list can be saved under any name and printed whenever the urge strikes. Instead of being keyboard secrets, these shortcut keys are yours to use and enjoy and share with your friends. The more word gets around about these obscure functions, the more they will enter into keyboard life and start performing the functions for which they were intended.

Note: For users with different versions of MS Word, hit F1 to access the help file and then type in “keyboard shortcuts” to see the list as well.

Now that users have the list that once was open only to Bill Gates, here are a couple of keyboard secrets for those who don’t feel the need to print off the entire list. Say, for example, that the user has been working on a Word document. He leaves it for a day or two, after which he then abridges it, adds some more material, plays around with it a little bit. Then, if the user wants to go back to where he originally left off, he can open the document and press Shift-F5. And there it is, another of the legendary keyboard secrets revealed.

Another former keyboard secret that’s fun to use and share is the calculator function. To use Word as a calculator, hit the View menu, choose Toolbars, then Customize. Choose the Commands tab in the Customize box. On a new, blank line, type 300 and hit Enter. Type 200, hit Enter. Type 1457, hit Enter. Select all the numbers, click Calculate. Now get this: the sum of the numbers will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the window.

Use the numbers you want and paste the result into your document by pressing Ctrl-V. No longer a keyboard secret, try this and see how it goes. And have fun revealing the rest of the keyboard secrets to all your friends so the functions can at last be put to good use.

This is a guest post by Karen Worthy, a tech enthusiast.

Technorati Tags: MS Word, Microsoft Word, Microsoft, Word, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, Keyboard Tricks, Shortcut Keys

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

» Filed Under MS Office Tips

5 Responses to “Revealed at Last: Keyboard Shortcut Secrets from MS Word”

Nirmal said on : May 12th, 2008 at 9:46 pm

I had got these as a word document long time back. Was wondering if this feature can be enabled in word 2007?

akishore said on : May 12th, 2008 at 11:59 pm

Nirmal, what do you mean by enabled in Word 2007? I think you can use the built-in macro to print out the list of Word keyboard shortcuts at any time.

Colin said on : May 13th, 2008 at 8:44 am

very useful to me.a rookie in helpdesk’s boat.
thanks posting the DOC, akishore

akishore said on : May 13th, 2008 at 3:45 pm

Colin, no problem. The Word 2007 keyboard shortcut list is really useful! I use Word a lot and it’s much easier to use via the keyboard.