Create keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Office

Learning shortcuts is one thing, but creating your own lets you accelerate the tasks you perform most often and work efficiently. The good news is that the world’s most popular productivity suite makes it easy to do. Here’s how to define shortcuts in Microsoft Office.

1 Find the keyboard shortcuts panel We’re working in Microsoft Word, but the principle is the same in the other Office applications. Start by clicking File, followed by Options. Then pick Customize Ribbon from the sidebar and click the Customize… button beside Keyboard shortcuts. You can ignore everything else in the Ribbon customisation dialog.

2 Find the function you need Microsoft has helpfully broken down each of the applications’ options according to the tab on which they appear, and put a few specialist ones – such as Publish Blog – in bespoke categories of their own. Find the menu tab you need in the Categories window and scroll through the various commands until you get to the one you want to customise.

3( Re)define the keyboard sequence If your selected function already has a keyboard shortcut, it’ll be shown in the Current keys box. In this case, we want to apply a new shortcut to Strikethrough, which doesn’t normally have a shortcut of its own, so we’ve selected it, clicked in the “Press new shortcut key” box and pressed Ctrl + Shift + Alt + X to assign it that combination.

4 Check for conflicts As you can see beneath the Current keys box, this combination hasn’t yet been assigned to any other function. If it had – say, for example, we’d pressed Ctrl + B, which normally sets bold text – we’d have seen a warning allowing us to choose a different key combination. Now press Assign followed by Close to save the change to the Normal template.

5 Less typing, more words If you frequently insert the same block of text into documents, you can save time here as well by setting up Word (or another Office app) to add it for you when you type a shortcut. As an example, let’s set up a standard legal disclaimer: start by clicking Proofing in the Options sidebar, followed by AutoCorrect Options…

6 Enter your AutoCorrect text Now click in the “Replace:” box and add the trigger text. This needs to be something you wouldn’t generally type: we’ve chosen “insertlegalnow”. Enter the legal text in the “With:” box, then click Add, followed by OK. Finally, test the replacement (and check the spelling) by typing insertlegalnow in a document and watching the defined text automatically replace it.