Like most Proposal Managers, I spend all day in Microsoft Word. While I’d like to say I’m an “advanced user” of Word, I don’t know how legit the assessment is. I don’t often create macros, or add building blocks, or do anything with VB in Word. For the fancy stuff, I know it’s best to call on the true experts.
I do have a list of my favorite and often used keyboard shortcuts. Maybe you’ll discover a new one on the list.
- ALT + 0150 – how to change a hyphen into an “en” dash
- ALT + 0150 – how to change a hyphen into an “em” dash – now if I could just remember when I’m supposed to use which one…
- CTRL + * – I like to place RFP text in my proposal templates as a reference, and I format it as hidden text. This little shortcut allows you to toggle editing marks on an off. It’s really useful to see how you’re doing on page count.
- SHIFT + F3 – this is the magic keystroke combination that toggles your text from ALL CAPS, to Normal Caps, to no caps.
- CTRL + ALT+ Enter – I can’t remember what the actual name of this is, but I call it a “soft enter.” This is the feature that allows you to have two different formatting styles in the same paragraph. Example 1 – When you have an action caption, but only want to have the title of the caption show up in the table of contents. Example 2 – You need to save space in your document so you want your heading style to be applied but the text to follow right after (a run-in heading).
- CTRL + PgDn – You know how the PgDn function actually doesn’t go a page down, it just goes one screen view down? This drives me nuts. If you click CTRL + PgDn, it will scroll down to the next real page.
Did you pick up a new shortcut in my brief list? What are your favorites? I’d love to hear!