5 Quick Time-Saving Tips for Microsoft Word

Here are five tips for Microsoft Word that are designed to be quick and efficient time-savers. When you start to learn these tricks and they become second nature, you’ll find that all of your work in Word will get faster and faster.

1. Quick-select sections of text

Messing around with the mouse trying to highlight exactly the section of text that you need is time-consuming and often frustrating. So here are two tips for the price of one on ways to highlight the text that you want with no fuss, no muss.

To select an entire paragraph, just make three rapid clicks anywhere on the paragraph. This will select your entire paragraph.

What if you only want to select a specific sentence instead of a whole paragraph? Well, you can do that too! On a Mac, hold down Command and click. If you’re on Windows, you’ll want to hold down Ctrl and click. The result is that you’ll select just the sentence that you’re targeting.

2. Use keyboard shortcuts for subscript and superscript

When you’re working on academic papers, you might need to frequently notate portions of text using subscript or superscript. Navigating manually to change this is a real pain, but did you know there are keyboard shortcuts to immediately put you in subscript or superscript mode? For Mac users, just hit Command plus to make text subscript. For superscript, hit Command + Shift + plus. For Windows, click Ctrl plus (for subscript) or Ctrl + Shift + plus (for superscript).

3. Instantly add a horizontal line

Have you ever wanted to put a horizontal line in your text? You don’t have to navigate to the menu bar at all to do that. In fact, all you have to do is go to a clean line, enter three hyphens in a row, and then hit enter. You’ll instantly have a horizontal line dividing your page.

4. Delete words, not individual letters

If you’ve made a wrong word choice, you don’t have to delete each character in that word individually. Instead, you can just hold down the Command key and then hit backspace (on a Mac) in order to delete the entire word that you last typed. On Windows, click Ctrl + backspace.

5. Increase or decrease font size with a keyboard shortcut

Highlight your text, and on a Mac, use Command + Shift + > to increase the font size. You can also use Command + Shift + < to decrease the font size. On Windows, use Ctrl + Shift + > or Ctrl + Shift + <.