Practical Technical Information for Professional Translators

Microsoft Word tips for Translators

Microsoft Word Shortcut Keys

If you like using keyboard shortcuts instead of mouse-clicks in order to save time, here is a list of shortcuts designed to get you moving faster... Time is money!!! Also keep in mind that many of these keyboard shortcuts will work in other Microsoft products, such as Excel, Powerpoint and Access.

Ctrl + A: Select all
Ctrl + B: Bold
Ctrl + C: Copy
Ctrl + D: Font Formatting
Ctrl + E: Center Alignment
Ctrl + F: Find/Replace
Ctrl + G: Goto
Ctrl + H: Replace
Ctrl + I: Italics
Ctrl + J: Justified Alignment
Ctrl + K: Insert Hyperlink
Ctrl + L: Left Alignment
Ctrl + M: Indent
Ctrl + N: New document
Ctrl + O: Open a document
Ctrl + P: Print
Ctrl + Q: Paragraph Spacing
Ctrl + R: Right Alignment
Ctrl + S: Save current document
Ctrl + T: Hanging Indent
Ctrl + U: Underline
Ctrl + V: Paste
Ctrl + W: Close document
Ctrl + X: Cut
Ctrl + Y: Repeat
Ctrl + Z: Undo

Microsoft Word -- Stylizing your Document

You are probably already familiar with using styles in your Microsoft Word documents. Using styles allows the author of the document to define text formatting properties and other attributes quickly and easily.

Sometimes, however, you need to access additional styles that were not included in the original document, but when you click on the arrow in the Style list box, you can see only the current document's styles. So how do you access the other styles? The answer is easier than you might think...

Hold down the SHIFT key while clicking the arrow at the right side of the Style list box and all available styles will be displayed. You might even find some listed there that you didn't know existed!

Microsoft Word -- Create a quick Word Count button

Word counts are easy to perform in Microsoft Word -- just click the Tools menu and choose Word Count. But did you know that you can also create a special Toolbar button to perform the same task, thus giving you "one-click" access to the word count feature?

Here's what you do to create a word count button:

1. First, choose Tools --> Customize from the menu, and then click the Commands tab.
2. Next, in the Categories list, click Tools. The list of tools available appears on the right side of the dialog box.
3. Finally, Scroll through the list of tools, select "Word Count" and drag it to your toolbar.

Incidentally, you can create special buttons for any of the functions listed here, which is quite handy if you find yourself always having to go up and click multiple times within the menus to find the Tools that you need.

NOTE: Keep in mind that the Word Count function does not count words in text boxes -- in order to count these, you should create a separate macro to do the job. Try this one as a sample and modify it to suit your purposes.

Sub FullWordcount()

Dim Wordcount As Long
Wordcount = ActiveDocument.BuiltInDocumentProperties(wdPropertyWords)
For Each ashape In ActiveDocument.Shapes
If ashape.TextFrame.HasText Then
Wordcount = Wordcount + ashape.TextFrame.TextRange.ComputeStatistics(Statistic:= wdStatisticWords)
End If
Next ashape
MsgBox ("The document has " & Wordcount & " words")

End Sub

Microsoft Word -- Using 'Find & Replace' for special characters
(Reprinted from the "Dummies Daily" E-Mail Tips Archive)

Some characters you just can't properly type in the Find and Replace dialog box, such as the Tab character. If you press the Tab key in the Find and Replace dialog box, nothing happens. That is because the Tab character, plus a few others, are special, and you must force-feed them into the Find and Replace dialog box.

To find a special, unprintable character, click the More button to see the expanded Find and Replace dialog box and then click the Special button. A list of various characters Word can search for pops up. Choose one of the items in the list to search for that special character. When you do, a special shorthand representation for that character appears in the Find What box (such as ^t for Tab). Now you can click the Find Next button to find that character.