Chapter 4: Word Keyboard Shortcuts

Of all the Office applications, Word is perhaps the best suited to using keyboard shortcuts. First, a typical Word document has more text and fewer graphical objects than a typical document in any other Office application (with the possible exception of an Outlook e-mail message), so it s convenient to work with the keyboard. Second, Word comes with many built-in keyboard shortcuts that cover a wide variety of actions. Third, Microsoft has made Word very easy to customize, so you can create new keyboard shortcuts and change the built-in keyboard shortcuts as needed.

We ll start with Word s built-in shortcuts and then move on to customizing keyboard shortcuts.

Word s Built-in Shortcuts

Word has more shortcuts than most of the other Office applications put together. This section presents them broken into subsections by topic. We ll start with the differences worth noting about Word s implementation of the shared Office keyboard shortcuts.