Blogpost by Jeffrey Clark (Student Digital Champion)
Making things easier
Microsoft Word is perhaps the most used and widely recognized computer program in all of academia. Virtually every course you can take at Aberystwyth University uses Microsoft Word to some degree, with some courses requiring you to do more with it than just type out an essay. In this blog post, I’ll tell you about some shortcuts in Microsoft Word that have helped me during my studies.
Tip 1: Keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts are a combination of keys that you press to perform a function. For example, press control (ctrl) and C at the same time while highlighting text copies that text onto your clipboard. Instead of right-clicking and scrolling down the drop-down menu to ‘Paste’, you can press ctrl + V to paste the text instead.
The ALT key can also be used for shortcuts. Specifically, the ALT key is used for shortcuts as they relate to the top task bar. By holding down the ALT key for a few seconds, the keys for each shortcut will pop up. For instance, on my keyboard, pressing ALT and 2 will save my document.
But if we press ALT + S to go to the References tab…
We get an entirely new set of ALT keyboard commands to use!
By holding down the ALT with a different tab open we can see what shortcuts are available for each tab on the taskbar. If you forget what ALT key shortcuts do, holding the ALT key down will give you a helpful reminder of your keyboard shortcuts!
