How To...^ A step-by-step guide to tweaking your PC Experience
L
ove it or hate it, Word is here to stay. As the dominant word pro-
cessor, it’s used by virtually everyone. But even the most prolific
Word experts are probably only tapping into 10 or 20 percent of
the program’s many nifty features, so we’ve gathered some of our
favorites here for your benefit.MS Word Skills
IMPROVE YOUR
BY OMEED CHANDRA
66 MAXIMUMPC APRIL 2004
Why waste energy sliding
a mouse around your desk
when you can use the key-
board to perform the same
tasks in a lot less time?
Word’s keyboard shortcuts
will allow you to do just
that. For instance, you can
jump to the previous or
next page in a document by
holding Control and press-
ing Page Up or Page Down.
Meanwhile, holding Control
and hitting Home or End will
take you to the top or bot-
tom of the current document,
respectively. Holding Shift
(or both Control and Shift)
and pressing the arrow keys
is an easy way to highlight
text in a document. You can
also zoom in and out by
pressing Control and sliding
the mouse wheel up and
down. And if you use sub-
script and superscript very
often, you’ll love this one:
Press Control, Shift, and the
plus sign (+) to toggle super-
script, or just Control and the
plus sign to toggle subscript.Useful keyboard shortcuts
Everyone knows how to add new words to Word’s
spell-check dictionary, but it’s also possible to custom-
ize many other aspects of Word to fit your writing
style. Open up the Tools menu and click Options, then
head over to the Spelling & Grammar tab. From here,
you can specify all sorts of rules and options for the
spell- and grammar-check, or even completely disable
them if you like. Click the Settings button and you’ll
find even more parameters, such as the number of
spaces to require between sentences.Customize Word to your writing style
You ain’t seen nothin’ til you ‘figured
them thar grammer settin’s to fit yer
writin’ style. Word lets ya do purty much
anything.You ain’t seen nothin’ til you ‘figuredNo one should have to use a mouse in
Word , ever. Do you hear that? Never! Make
custom keyboard shortcuts for your com-
monly used tasks!Defining your own keyboard shortcuts
We reveal some
of the software’s
hidden tricks
Does Word lack a keyboard shortcut for a function
you often use? Don’t worry—creating your own
shortcut is easy. Click the Tools menu and select
Customize, then click the Keyboard button. Find the
function for which you want to create a shortcut by
choosing the appropriate category and command,
and then specify a keystroke sequence for the
shortcut. Be sure to select whether you want the
shortcut to apply to all documents or just the cur-
rent document using the “Save changes in” drop-
down box. Finally, click the Assign button, then
close the window and return to the Word editing
screen to test out your new shortcut! You can print
out a list of all the shortcut keys you’ve defined
by opening the File menu and clicking Print, then
choosing “Key assignments” from the “Print what”
drop-down box.No one should have to use a mouse in