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Training > Tutorials > Microsoft Word > Word Tips 101
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Adjusting and Using the Recently Used List
Word Tips 101
Adjusting and Using the Recently Used List
To quickly reopen a recently opened file, it's much faster to get in the habit of just clicking Word's File menu and choose the name of the file from the bottom of the file menu where the last most recently used files are listed. With a click on the file name, Word will reopen the file, rather than having to navigate through directories on your hard drive to find the file.
However, if you're like me, you may have to jump back and forth between more than just a few files in a day and it would be very convenient if the list showed more than the last few files. Well, you can up the number of files that are shown in the Recently Opened File list under the File menu in Word. Just click Tools/Options/General. At the bottom, you'll see the Recently Opened Files counter. Just set the counter to your preferred number, anywhere between 1-9. If you wish to remove the list form your file menu, just unclick the option box.
Did you know that there is a keystroke in Word that allows you to repeat your LAST action over and over again? The repeat key is F4. Say you just applied some formatting that took several clicks through dialogs to set. Now you need to apply this same formatting to one or more other areas in your document. Rather than highlighting other text and going through all those dialog clicks again, just hit the F4 key and that previous effort will be reapplied again.
Note! This Repeat key will only apply your LAST complete action. So keep this in mind. If need to apply both Paragraph and Font formatting, only the Font formatting (last action) will be repeated. If you need to copy more detailed formatting, you can use the Format Painter tool to copy all formatting and reapply it to other text.
If you have a copy/paste project that seems overwhelming because you need to copy lots of text/paragraphs from one doc to another and you're getting tired of the constant copy/switch/paste/return/find/copy/switch/paste, you can make the process easier by using a Spike.
Normally, when you copy something to the clipboard, the new item you copy replaces whatever was previously copied there. But if you use Word's Spike feature, it will allow you to accumulate text by appending the newly copied text to the end of the previous text, while each item is sitting out of sight on the clipboard. This way, you can pile up a large file by adding various chunks of text from various documents so you can paste it all, once.
To activate the Spike, open a document, highlight the necessary text. But rather than just clicking Edit/Copy, or using the shortcut keys of Ctrl/C to copy the highlighted text to the clipboard, use the special Spike keystroke, Ctrl/F3.
Note! This will actually cut the highlighted text from the doc and save that info to the clipboard. This means that it removes it from the original document. So if you don't want that info to actually be removed from the original doc, make sure you've saved it before you start spiking the text. Then make sure you don't save the document, this way you're only borrowing the text and the changes are not saved in the original file.
Then open the new file and press the new Spike retrieval keystroke, Ctrl/Shift/F3 to paste the accumulated text to the new file. Then save the new file.
To quickly access a header or footer, rather than clicking View/Header and Footer, you can quickly move to a headers or footers by double clicking on the grayed out area containing the header/footer. To quickly close the header/footer and return to your document text, just double click on the now grayed out document text.
You can quickly switch line spacing by highlighting the text and pressing Ctrl/1, /5, /2 for single, 1.5, or double spacing, respectively.
To save yourself time, get in the habit of using shortcut key combos, such as Ctrl/B, Ctrl/I to toggle (turn on/off) bold and italic. Rather than typing text and then highlighting the text and clicking the Bold or Italic format icons, you can simply press these shortcut keys as you're typing. To find a FULL LIST of all the shortcuts combos available in Word, hit the F1 Help key and type Shortcuts.
Use the AutoCorrect feature to help you type faster. Since you probably have to type specific words several times in your day-to-day documents, such as your company name, you can add an acronym into AutoCorrect, such as mc[space] to equal My Company. Then whenever you need to type your company name, just type mc and AutoCorrect will automatically insert your company name.
If you're using smart quotes (which give you real curly quotes), how do you change them so you can make real inch markers? No need to keep turning on/off the smart quotes feature. Just type the quotes. They will automatically turn into curly quotes. Then press Ctrl/Z, which is your Undo shortcut key combo. This will reverse the last action, thereby removing the special auto correction curly quotes that were applied by Word's auto correction feature.
Note! Using the Undo keystroke will remove any auto correction changes that Word decides to make for you!
If you have a document that has an generated Table of Contents (created with the Insert/Tables and Index/Table Of Content command), did you know that the page numbers are hyperlinks which you can click to jump to that page? Try it! Just click on a page number in a Word generated Table of Contents and you'll automatically jump to that page.