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!