When working in Microsoft Office, there are a number of hotkeys available to you. Hotkeys are combinations of keystrokes which allow you to do (quickly) certain operations such as bolding text, moving around the document, and saving your work.These keyboard combinations improve productivity by reducing the number of actions needed to accomplish a given task. Part of hotkeys improving productivity is that both hands remain on the keyboard: you do not have to stop typing and grab the mouse. For example, in order to save a document in Word, you need to stop typing, put your hand on the mouse, and then you can click the Office Button and select Save from the menu which appears or you can simply press the keyboard combination Ctrl-S. Since Microsoft Office is an application suite, you can use the same hotkeys in all of the programs we will be covering this semester. Learn once, use many times.
The following is a list of some of the more frequently used Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows hotkeys.
For general editing purposes, use:
- Ctrl+B to bold selected text
- Ctrl+I to italicize selected text
- Ctrl+U to underline selected text
- Ctrl+C to copy selected text to the clipboard
- Ctrl+V to paste copied text from the clipboard
- Ctrl+Z to undo the previous action
- Ctrl+Y to repeat the previous action
- Ctrl+Home to move the cursor to the very top of a document
- Ctrl+End to move the cursor to the very end of a document
- Ctrl+F to open the Find dialog box
- Ctrl+H to open the Replace dialog box
- Ctrl+G to open the GoTo dialog box
- Ctrl+> to increase the size of the font of the selected text
- Ctrl+< to decrease the size of the font of the selected text
- Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar to insert a non-breaking space
- Ctrl+Shift+Hyphen to insert a non-breaking hyphen
- Alt+Shift+X to insert an index entry
- Tab to increase the indent level of the bulleted item
- Shift+Tab to decrease the indent level of the bulleted item
