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10 lesser-known shortcuts for formatting Word text

For those of us who spend time in Word, "Thank you!"

Try Ctrl+Shift+A to notice that it is nearly a toggle. IF you use it to capitalize a selection, you can later use it to return that selection to its original case. I prefer using Shift+F3. It changes case more intelligently - upper/lower/lower with proper caps.

Thanks for the shortcuts!

Most needed is a 'text fill' that fills text to the margin boundaries. Take a message that is no more than
half the margin width and [insert shortcut here ] and the text is filled across the paragraph margins.

... This one comes all the way from Office 4.3 and still works in all versions of Word, although in my experience it's surprisingly little known. If you use tables a lot and find clicking+dragging and/or SHIFT+cursor keys to be an awkward way to select an entire table, with ALL of its necessary formatting but NO unwanted extraneous data, try simply placing the cursor anywhere within the table then pressing ALT+SHIFT+NUMPAD 5 (NOT the keyboard 5 - it won't work). Hey presto - entire table, with all its hidden formatting (even if you're not viewing it already) instantly highlighted!

Hope this is useful.

Cheers,
Nell Smith

Need a couple pages of text to play with, and hate Latin? in previous versions of Word, both Mac and PC, type the following on a new line and hit the [return] key: =rand()
You get several paragraphs of "the quick brown fox ..." If you type "=rand(7,4) I think you get either 7 paragraphs of 4 sentences or 4 paras of 7 sentences.

In Word 2007, you get repeating chunks of what looks like a Help document. Handy for trying out the shortcuts revealed here.

Word 2007 added another secret random text generator:

=lorem()

which generates the following pseudo latin text:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna.
Nunc viverra imperdiet enim. Fusce est. Vivamus a tellus.
Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Proin pharetra nonummy pede. Mauris et orci.

Shift+F3 toggles highlighted text between all lower case, Initial Cap, and ALL UPPER CASE. More versatile than CTRL+Shift+A. CTRL+Shift+Enter inserts a paragraph marker above and outside of a table at the top of a page. CTRL+Shift+Spacebar inserts a space between characters that will keep them together regardless of line breaks.

Many of these are new to me - so thank you. Anyone have a shortcut to "recovering" control of the cursor? I think my rollerball is starting to fail because every now and then I lose control of the cursor. It drops to the taskbar, a weird symbol appears and I can't get control back unless I turn the computer off at the power switch. Of course, I've always got 3 or 4 windows open doing stuff and sometimes I lose the work when I have to shut down. Any ideas welcomed.

Another practical thing is CTRL-Q for resetting any paragraph formatting back to that of the style, similarly CTRL-SPACE for resetting any character formatting back to that of the style.
These come in handy when too many users have fiddled around with the formatting buttons and you need a document to have a consistent style...

Very Useful

Thank you very much for these shortcuts. They are very useful. Also, for viewers reading this comment, read the other comments as they also have other useful key combinations not mentioned here.

Some of the best tips I've seen on word in a long time. Thanks!