Posts Tagged ‘combination’

Assign a Shortcut Key to your Styles in MS Word

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

I have covered using styles in previous blog posts, but did you know you could assign a shortcut key combination to your styles?  And why wouldn’t you want to do this??  After all, it does save you valuable time and keystrokes!

Follow the steps below to define a shortcut key combination for a style:

  1. Display the task pane by first clicking on the Home tab of your Ribbon and then clicking the small icon in the lower right-hand corner of the Styles group. In earlier versions MS Word displays the Styles and Formatting task pane at the right-hand side of your screen.
  2. In the list of styles, hover your mouse over the name of the style whosse shortcut key would would like to change and a drop-down arrow should appear to the right of the style name.
  3. Click the down arrow and choose Modify or right-click and select Modify to display the dialog box.
  4. Click on Format and select Shortcut Key from the menu and the Customize Keyboard dialog box will appear.
  5. Click the key combination you would like to apply to your style. Any current assignments for that particular key combination appear just below what you just keyed in.
  6. Click on Assign.
  7. Click Close.
  8. Click on OK to close teh Modify Style dialog box.

That’s all there is to it!

 

Legal Line Spacing in MS Word

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

A lot of legal secretaries have written to me asking for ways to quickly change the line spacing in a document as they are frequently moving from single line spacing for block quotes and double line spacing for text and then back to single line spacing for signature blocks in pleadings.

It really isn’t all that difficult. If you find that you are frequently changing the line spacing in MS Word to double or you are making the switch more often than not, it’s time to take measures so that this happens seamlessly and without lots of time and keystrokes.

After speaking with more than a few of these secretaries I found that most of them were using the Normal style in their documents and so I will assume for this tip that everyone is, although hopefully not!

I could tell you how to modify your Normal.dot style, which is the style on which you base every new document in MS Word, but I don’t see the point to that because then every document you create would have double line spacing. Wouldn’t that be a fine howdy do?

Instead, I will give you a quick key combination to use to change your line spacing on the fly in your documents.

When you are setting up your document using the Normal.dot style, everything will be in single line spacing.

Once you have typed the heading of your pleading, you now want to start using double line spacing so place your cursor where you want that spacing to start and depress and hold your CTRL key and click the number 2 on your keyboard.

That’s it! When you want to go back to single spacing, depress and hold your CTRL key and click on the number 1 on your keyboard.

Quick and easy, just the way I like it!

 

Having said all of that, if you are a legal secretary and are in a practice where you have lots of pleadings, it would behoove you to start using styles and/or templates – they make your life soooo much easier and it makes you look sooo professional!