Even if you’re a diehard mouse person, certain keyboard shortcuts are undeniably useful — especially when it comes to formatting. Here are five areas where you can save time using the keyboard instead of traipsing around the Ribbon or searching through menus for the options you need.
1: Apply styles
Not everyone uses styles to format their documents, which is really too bad — styles are almost always more efficient than manual formatting. But even if you’re style-shy, you’ll appreciate the instant formatting provided by these little shortcuts. They work on the current paragraph or multiple selected paragraphs:
2: Adjust font size
Word offers two types of size adjustment, although it’s a subtle distinction:
So, for instance, the first shortcut would increase a selection of 12-point Calibri to 13 points. But the second shortcut would increase it to 14 points.
3: Modify line or paragraph spacing
These are handy if you’re trying to add white space and/or improve readability in a document but you don’t have a lot of time to spend tweaking the layout and design:
4: Transfer formatting
I always get some truculent feedback when I share this shortcut — apparently, the Format Painter feature has a militant and devoted following. But this trick offers something Format Painter doesn’t: It remembers the formatting you copied until the end of your Word session. So if you think you may need to apply a particular set of formatting attributes at various times as you work, this trick is golden:
5: Remove manually applied formatting
If you often work with documents created by other people, you’ve probably encountered more than your share of extraneous formatting. You may have even applied some dubious touches yourself, in the form of wild fonts or excessive italics. The fastest way to eliminate all the manual formatting from selected text and get back to the underlying styles is to use these shortcuts:
