Video:Word Tutorial: Useful Keyboard Shortcuts

Transcript:Word Tutorial: Useful Keyboard Shortcuts

Hello, My name is Nathanael Rittichier with About.com. And today I'm going to show you some useful keyboard shortcuts that you can use in Microsoft Word.

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts in Microsoft Word

Keyboard shortcuts in Word are really more of a timesaver than they are anything else. As an example: if you're trying to find a particular word within your document an easy way to do that within word is to hit Ctrl (if you have a PC, Command if you have a Mac) Command + F. and that will be up a navigation allowing you to simply type in the word you want to find within your document. It will go through and highlight each and every word.

Cut, Copy, Paste Shortcuts in Microsoft Word

Other useful shortcuts that I use quite frequently are cut, copy and paste. For copy you simply highlight the text you would like to copy. Then you hit command or control + C. That copies that text. To paste it's command + V. Now to cut text it would be control (or command) + X. That will cut the text and allow you to paste it somewhere else in your document.

Important Keyboard Shortcuts in Word

Another useful shortcut, that everyone who every uses a computer should know, is Command + Z or Control + Z. That is actually the undo function that will allow you to undo any action that you have done.

Another useful shortcut in Word is highlighting text. Now, to highlight per character just using your keyboard shortcuts you simply hit shift and use your arrow keys to go over the individual characters or if you use your down arrow key it will actually select that individual line.

Now to select all the text in your document you you simply hit Command or Control + A. And that will select all of the text within the document. This comes in handy if you're trying to copy all of the text from one document and paste it into another. Some more useful shortcuts are that of changing text to bold, italicized and underlined. To do that all you do is highlight a bit of text that you would like to change and you would hit Command or Control. Again it depends on if you're using a PC or a Mac.

So you would hit Command + B to make the text bold. Command + I will give you italicized. And Command + U will underline that bit of text.

A keyboard shortcut that you should used continually while working within Word is that of the save shortcut, to do that, it is simply Control + S, on the PC, or Command + S on the Mac.

Using Key Tips to Find Shortcuts in Word

Now a very useful keyboard shortcut in word is that of the key tips. It will actually give you many options for keyboard shortcuts while you're working in your document. To access this you simply hit the ALT key. And as you'll notice it assigns a letter to several actions and tabs. And to navigate to these tabs you simply hit the corresponding letter. So once I hit ALT, if I would like to go to page layout I simply hit P. And there we have it page layout pops up. And as you can see it again assigned letters to various activities.

So if I would like to break my document up into, lets say, columns, I would just find the corresponding letter, there it's J, and hit J. That will give me my options. I use my arrow keys to scroll down, find the amount of columns I would like, and simply hit Enter. And there we are, without using the mouse, I was able to navigate through tabs find the action I want and apply it to my document.

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