Learning a couple Microsoft Word shortcuts has the potential to save you plenty of time, help you create truly professional documents and look that much better in the eyes of your workplace superior.  However, most people do not invest the little bit of time necessary to master these shortcuts and tricks, assuming such commands will either prove too complicated or difficult to remember.  Below, we simplify the most important MS Word tips to help office workers across the land make the most of this word processing program.

Save Your Preferred Formatting for Posterity’s Sake

Most people create the same documents over and over again for work purposes on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.  There is no sense resetting the exact same format over and over again when it is possible to save your preferred formatting in Microsoft Word.  The program’s Quick Styles empowers users to save formatting preferences so they are pre-loaded for the next document.

As an example, if you desire the text to be size 16 font and typically use a centered and bold headline, highlight the text, click Styles Pane within the Home ribbon, choose New Style and name it whatever you desire.  The format will then be saved for subsequent use.

Keyboard Shortcuts are Your Friend

There is no sense clicking the mouse over and over again, navigating one menu after another when you can perform the desired action within MS Word with a keyboard shortcut.  As an example, pressing the Control button along with the A key selects the entirety of the text in the document so you do not have to endlessly scroll while long-pressing the mouse.

Consider an instance when you mistakenly type several words or paragraphs in all capital letters, hold down the Shift button along with the F3 button after highlighting the text in question.  This is a quick way to toggle through styles ranging from lower case letters to upper case letters, title case, etc.

Another convenient shortcut is pressing the asterisk (*) key just prior to pressing the spacebar.  This button combination rapidly generates a bulleted list without moving away from the current position within the document.

Remove Undesirable Formatting

Wouldn’t it be nice to clear the formatting from an external website or other source after pasting text into MS Word?  You can do so by pressing the Control button along with the spacebar.  This key combination eliminates the highlighted text’s formatting so you can begin anew with your selected formatting.

Smart Lookup

Highlight a word/phrase, right-click it and you will be greeted by Microsoft Word’s Smart Lookup feature.  This rapid shortcut empowers you to browse the internet without having to open up a separate web browsing window.  Tap into this powerful web-scanning tool and you will be able to obtain a wealth of information in shockingly little time, ultimately enhancing the quality of your text document.

Conceal the Ribbon Interface

Plenty of Microsoft Word users do not enjoy looking at the ribbon interface.  This interface is the toolbar positioned along the top of the program.  If you do not use the ribbon interface or simply do not like the look of it, you can conceal it to free up more space on the screen for your MS Word text.

Here’s how to get rid of the ribbon interface: Open up MS Word.  Click the Control key on your keyboard along with the F1 key.  This pressing of keys in unison causes the ribbon interface to disappear.  If you would like to bring the ribbon interface back, press the keys in unison once again and it will reappear.