With the right tricks and keyboard shortcuts, you can do a lot more with Microsoft Word. This week, we’ll go over four neat and useful capabilities that can save you time.
Generate Dummy Text
Here’s a cool trick to generate random text to make sure a document is formatted properly. Rather than search online for some to copy and paste dummy text, type =rand(# of paragraphs you want) and press Enter. This fills your document with text for you to experiment with. This is useful for creating formatted documents and testing the appearance of fonts.
Bulleted List Keyboard Shortcut
Instead of scanning the toolbar for the bullet list icon, hit * followed by a space, and Microsoft Word will add the bulleting for you. You can create a dashed list or a numbered list in the same way by substituting a hyphen or a number.
Selecting a Single Sentence
Using a mouse to select a sentence by clicking and dragging can be annoyingly inaccurate. Try pressing Ctrl while using one of the Arrow Keys to highlight all the words up to that word. Easily select sentences, paragraphs, or entire pages without switching to the mouse.
Quick Tables
Create a quick table in Microsoft Word by pressing + [Tab] + [Tab] +…, followed by Enter. This creates a single table row with the + for each column.
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