– Shortcuts

Sometimes you need to insert special characters into your ms, but these aren’t like the Symbols we discussed before…these are mostly invisible. Yes, invisible, yet very important.

Note: If you haven’t made non-printing characters visible yet, now would be a good time to do so. Remember, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl-Shift-* and you’ll see the pilcrow highlighted in the Paragraph group on the Home tab.

The first character is one that you’ve used hundreds of time but probably never thought about: The Paragraph Break. You get this invisible character by simply hitting the Enter key, which you do at the end of every paragraph. With non-printing characters visible, it looks just like the pilcrow on the button above: ¶ (Note: Stored inside this one character is a bunch of formatting info.)

Next is the Line Break. It is used when you want to end a line, but not start a new paragraph. It looks like a small arrow with a hook: ↵ and you enter it with Shift-Enter.

Then there’s the Column Break. Useful if you have a multi-column section and the text in the columns doesn’t break where you want. It shows as a bunch of dots with the words Column Break in the middle. You can enter it by typing Ctrl-Shift-Enter.

Finally, there is the Page Break. It forces the next text onto a new page. It looks similar to the Column Break, but the dots are a bit tighter. You can put it in your document with Ctrl-Enter.

Three more: first another invisible one, then one that’s half visible, and finally a fully visible one.

The invisible one is a space…but it’s a special kind of space: a Non-breaking Space. You’d use it between a title and a name, such as “Dr. Smith”, so it stays together, not coming apart if it falls near the end of a line. It shows as a small circle instead of the regular dot used for a normal space, and you type it with Ctrl-Shift-Space.

Now the half visible one. It’s an Optional Hyphen. If you have a word that might break in the wrong place at the end of a line, you can tell Word exactly where you want the word to break. In the first example to the right, the word “elements” breaks in a strange place, so we put an Optional Hyphen right before the ‘m’ as shown in the second example. In the third, you can see the Optional Hyphen before the ‘m’ because it’s not being used, so it shows as ¬ and is entered with Ctrl-Hyphen.

Finally the fully visible character we promised. This one combines the Non-breaking Space and the Optional Hyphen, creating a Non-breaking Hyphen! If you have a hyphenated word that you want to keep together, not allowing it to break at all when near the end of a line, then you’d use a non-breaking hyphen. When you have non-printing characters turned on, it looks like a skinny dash, but just a normal hyphen when off—entered by Ctrl-Shift-Hyphen.

That covers all the special characters we are going to do this time…we’ll get to Dashes later.

Most folks already know how to use the Word commands Ctrl-C to copy, Ctrl-V to paste, and Ctrl-X to cut content out (for later pasting), but many times I find that when I paste, the text arrives not quite as expected…it has all the original formatting it had from the other location. For example, if I’m copying some text from the heading of a section that I want to paste into the middle of a paragraph, it is still big, bold, underlined, whatever it was in the heading, not the way the rest of the pgph appears.

As this is a discussion of shortcuts, I’m not going to go through the click-on-the-ribbon option, but it is available if you’re a mouse kinda person. I’m going to show you how to do it without taking your hands off the keyboard! As I’ve said before, if I have to let go of the keyboard, grab the mouse, wiggle it around, push it to where I want, click on something, then go back to the keyboard, I’ve wasted too much time that could be better spent on creating something wonderful.

As you edit in Word, you’ll find that many of the clicks on the ribbon can be replaced by typing, and if you watch as you do the ribbon click, you’ll see little boxes pop up that show the keypresses needed to do that same function, BUT there are more keyboard commands that aren’t listed—ones from the older versions of Word.

Shortcut:

Here’s one that I often use: after you Copy (or Cut) some text, move the cursor to where you want it to be, then tap Alt, E, S, U, U. (Holding Alt will sometimes give a different set of commands, so be certain to only TAP the Alt key, down and up, THEN type the other keys.) That key sequence will bring up the old Paste Special dialogue box and select the Unformatted Text option. Hit the Enter key, and the text is pasted in, conforming to the format of the surrounding text. That’s it!

Once you start using this shortcut, you’ll find it extremely helpful, in fact I use this method almost every time I’m pasting…just to avoid getting strange stuff included. It even works if copying from some other program…such as a web browser. There are some really bizarre formatting things going on out there, and this method will help you get around them.

Update:

After this was posted, a reader pointed out another method for pasting text only. After copying and positioning the cursor, hit the Menu key, T, and Enter. Even shorter! Try it out.

In a few previous posts (Essential, More Essential, and Extended), we covered a variety of keyboard shortcuts that could be useful when you are creating your masterpiece, but this time we’re going to hit on a few that work best when editing—your own work or someone else’s. (You can learn a lot from reading, critiquing, and editing others’ work…you don’t have time to make all the mistakes yourself, so try to learn from others!) Some Critique Groups read and mark up printed copies of mss, but there are a few that never meet physically, doing all their discussions online or via email. Whatever type of group you decide to join, these shortcuts will come in handy.

Seeing what’s there

Just as a matter of habit, I always have non-printing characters showing, but it’s especially useful if I’m trying to format a document for printing. There are often times when it looks right, even in print preview, but if you have an author who indents pgphs with multiple spaces, or starts a new page by multiple enters, or has extra tabs and spaces at the end of lines, you’ll never know unless you look.

• View or hide non-printing characters – Ctrl-Shift-* (asterisk on numeric pad does not work)

Whenever I start editing someone’s ms, I also make certain that I can see what changes I’ve suggested.

• Turn Track Changes on or off – Ctrl-Shift-E

Getting the Whole Picture

Being able to look at the document in different ways is always useful, too.

• Split or unsplit edit window – Ctrl-Alt-S (so you can see two parts at the same time)
• Switch to Draft view – Ctrl-Alt-N (focus on content, ignoring page layout)
• Switch to Outline view – Ctrl-Alt-O (focus on organization of topics)
• Switch to Print Layout view – Ctrl-Alt-P (see what each page with print will look like)
• Print Preview view – Ctrl-P or Ctrl-F2 or Ctrl-Alt-I (overall view, showing blank pages)

We’ll go over how to Edit in Print Preview mode in a later post, as it requires modifying some basic settings in Word.

Font Adjustments

Sometimes it’s helpful to add comments to the author that aren’t meant for the reader. Setting the Font to Hidden will do that. The text will only show up if non-printing characters are visible, but be careful as these characters will affect the format and layout when visible, so remember to turn them off before that step.

• Hidden – Ctrl-Shift-H

Changing selected text to the Symbol font is quick and easy, too.

• Change to Symbol font – Ctrl-Shift-Q

Sometimes you need to adjust the font for other reasons, so the Font Dialogue Box is just what you need.

• Open Font dialog box – Ctrl-Shift-F or Ctrl-D

Styles

Using styles is important to maintain consistency throughout a document, so besides the Style Gallery on the Home Tab, there are also two other task panes that will help.

• Open Styles task pane – Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S
• Open Apply Styles task pane – Ctrl-Shift-S

And finally, if all else fails, you may need to remove any local formatting changes.

• Remove manual character formatting – Ctrl-Space
• Remove manual paragraph formatting – Ctrl-Q

That should pretty much cover all the shortcuts you’ll need when editing, so have at it!