Time saving tricks in Microsoft Word can increase your productivity by reducing the time you spend editing documents. You may have seen these kinds of shortcuts and suggestions before, but we’re sure you’ll find something new in the list below.

Quick selection

  • To select a word, make two rapid clicks on the word in question
  • To select an entire paragraph, make three rapid clicks anywhere in the paragraph
  • To select a particular sentence, click anywhere in that sentence while holding down the Ctrl key

Faster formatting

  • Select some text -now if you will press Ctrl + Shift + > the font size of the selected text will increase. To decrease the font size use Ctrl + Shift + < combination
  • Ctrl+ makes a word subscript and Ctrl Shift + makes a word superscript
  • Use the Format Painter feature to quickly apply a particular format to a new area of your document. You’ll find it in the Home tab. Simply click to copy the formatting from the selected area of a document and use the paintbrush icon that appears to copy this formatting style into a different location within the document.
  • Typing =rand(8,10) and then pressing Enter will automatically generate random text you can use for testing the page formatting, fonts, etc. If typed as shown above Word will generate 8 paragraphs of 10 sentences each. The numbers inside the brackets can be anything up to 200 (i.e =rand(8, 200) would generate 8 paragraphs of 200 sentences each).

Other shortcuts

  • To create a horizontal line type 3 hyphens and then press Enter
  • To quickly create a table type a plus sign (+) then press Tab key; again type a plus and again press Tab key; do this as many times as the number of cells you want in your table. Then press Enter and a table shall appear.
  • To move cursor to the location where it was when you last save the document press Shift + F5
  • Pressing backspace while holding Ctrl key down deletes the preceding word