Ashley Pearson

Not all of us were born to be Microsoft Word wizards. But when you have a Word trick or two up your sleeve to impress fellow workers or clients, the look of wonder those little tricks create are always guaranteed to get you feeling all warm and fuzzy!

Whether you’re a seasoned writer or someone just looking to ease the stress of your daily battles with Word, the following tricks will hopefully have you sorted…

In no particular order…

TRICK #1

Removing uppercase (Shift + F3)

Oh yeah, the old Shift + F3 combo always wins them doubters over! One of the oldest and best tricks up my sleeve, this has impressed many a Product Manager struggling to fix a sentence totally in uppercase, thanks to a forgotten press of the CAPS LOCK key. A quick Shift + F3 combo press and Hey Presto, the uppercase is gone…another Shift + F3 press and the first letter of the selected word(s) is capitalized!

TRICK #2

Return to a previous location in the doc (Shift + F5)

OK, it’s the Shift + F5 combo this time…and this is great if you are going back and forth between pages and sections and lose track of where you are exactly. Just press Shift + F5 to jump your cursor to the place you were when you last saved the document.

TRICK #3

Adding table rows (ENTER)

Tables in Word are sometimes a little tricky. They are fairly easy to add to a doc, typically from the Insert > Table option, but finding the right menu option for adding a row to your table isn’t always the easiest. My trick is to go to the end of the row after which you want to add a new row, click OUTSIDE the table to the right of the said row, and then press ENTER. Voila, a new row is added!

TRICK #4

Find & Replace Formatting

So I’m guessing you’ve probably come across a document where you’ve wanted to change the formatting of a certain style or format throughout a doc, such as from a bold font to italic, or from a red font to the standard black. The Find & Replace tool is your friend for this one…

1. Press CTRL + H to display the Find and Replace dialog.
2. In the Find tab, click More>>>. In the extended section, click Format, and then select the relevant type (such as Font, or Style).
3. Select the relevant attributes (for example, if you selected Font, you can select Bold, or Italic…).
4. Click OK to confirm your selection. 
5. Click Find Next to find the relevant text in your doc. If you want to replace the selected format/style with something else, click the Replace tab and then define the relevant attributes to replace the selected format/style. Click Replace to replace formatting one by one or Replace All to do all the replacements in one go (be brave!).

TRICK #5

Select a Sentence (CTRL + click)

To wrap up our box of favorite tricks, ye olde sentence selection is a nice quickie! To highlight an entire sentence, press  the CTRL key and click anywhere in the relevant sentence. Voila, the entire sentence is selected!