Over the years, people have said that I’m "good" at using Word because I can create and format documents quickly. Although it’s true that I do understand some obscure stuff in Word, when it comes to formatting, I take advantage of just one simple formatting technique. I can format Word documents really quickly because whenever I use one of my templates, I make sure I set up the styles to include keyboard shortcuts.
Word has built-in keyboard shortcuts for a lot of the styles you might already be using every day. For example, click your mouse to place your cursor in a paragraph of text (don’t highlight anything). Now press Ctrl+Alt+1. Your text is formatted with the Heading 1 style. If you press Ctrl+Alt+2, your text switches to the Heading 2 style. To change it back to Normal text, press Ctrl+Shift+N. If you press Ctrl+Shft+L, the text changes to the List Bullet style.
As you can imagine, once you have these keyboard shortcuts memorized, you can blaze through document formatting. In fact, you can apply styles without even touching the mouse. A style affects the entire paragraph, so after you format one paragraph, you can use the arrow keys to move your cursor down the page. If you’re really tricky, you can even use Ctrl+down arrow to jump directly to the next paragraph.
Because I have created many of my own customized templates, I also have quite a few of my own styles set up. To add shortcuts to your own styles, you need to use the Customize feature. Click Tools|Customize and click the Commands tab. Now make sure you select the correct template from the Save changes in drop-down box and click the Keyboard button. Under Categories, scroll down to Styles and click it. You see all your styles listed to the right. Now find the style you want to have a keyboard shortcut. Click to select it and then click in the Press new shortcut key box. Now just type the shortcut key combination you want to assign to the style. The combination appears in the box. If another shortcut already is using that combination it will appear below. If you want to use your shortcut, click the Assign button. When you’re done adding keyboard shortcuts, click Close.
Now all your styles can be just as accessible as Word’s built-in styles. And you too can be a fast formatting fiend.