Bypassing Menus with Keyboard Shortcuts

Office includes a literally overwhelming number of keyboard shortcuts for nearly every task. Some mnemonic shortcuts, such as Ctrl+B (Bold), Ctrl+U (Underline), and Ctrl+I (Italic), are common to every Office application. Others follow Windows standards, such as the universal Ctrl+X (Cut), Ctrl+C (Copy), and Ctrl+V (Paste) shortcuts. Still others give you access to commands that are nearly impossible to access any other way. For example, there's no menu choice in Word to convert field codes to their results; you have to know the shortcuts: Ctrl+6 (from the numeric keypad, not the row of numbers above the QWERTY keys) or Ctrl+Shift+F9.

Office applications are remarkably consistent in their use of keyboard shortcuts, with one notable exception: Outlook is the black sheep, with many, many nonstandard keyboard shortcuts. Throughout every other Office application, for example, you use Ctrl+F to display the Find and Replace dialog boxes; in Outlook, however, that key combination forwards an item via e-mail. To find text in Outlook, press F4, which works as the Repeat key everywhere else in Office.

Only a savant could memorize every Office keyboard shortcut, but learning a select few can dramatically increase your productivity, especially for commands and functions you use regularly.

Of all the Office-wide keyboard shortcuts, one stands out as by far the most useful. F4 is the Repeat key, which repeats the previous action; it comes in handy in a wide variety of situations. For example, you can use F4 to apply a new style to a series of paragraphs scattered throughout a Word document. Click in the first paragraph and select the style from the drop-down list. Click in the next paragraph and press F4 instead of going back to the Style menu; F4 will continue to apply that style until you perform another action, such as typing or formatting. Add or delete a row in an Excel worksheet, and then move the insertion point and press F4 to add or delete another row, again without using menus.

Printing out an exhaustive list of shortcut keys for each Office application would take hundreds of pages. To see a generally complete list organized by category, search in each application's online help for a topic called "Keyboard Shortcuts."

Of all Office programs, only Word enables you to easily customize keyboard shortcuts. Select Tools, Customize, and then click the Keyboard button to select a command, a macro, an AutoText entry, a font, a style, or a common symbol. The Customize Keyboard dialog box displays the current key combination assigned to each item you select (see Figure 2.11).

To add or change a key combination, first select the item you want to assign; then click in the Press New Shortcut Key box and press the key combination. Check the text just below this box to see whether the key combination you've selected is already assigned to another function; if the option is available, click Assign. Look in the Current Keys box to see whether a key combination is already assigned to that function; to remove that definition, select the item and click Remove.

For details on how to restore default keyboard shortcuts if you inadvertently reassign the wrong key, see "Restoring Default Shortcut Keys" in the "Troubleshooting" section at the end of this chapter.