Microsoft Word provides several keyboard shortcuts to help you move around a document, which is important when you're serious about editing efficiently. You may not know, however, that Word includes commands to move from sentence to sentence--highly useful for an editor! The commands aren't mentioned in Word's Help file, and they're not assigned to any shortcut keys, but, sneaky guy that I am, I found them for you. The commands are:<\/p>\n
SentRight (which will move to the next sentence)<\/p>\n
SentLeft (which will move to the previous sentence)<\/p>\n
To use these commands, you'll probably want to assign them to shortcut keys (or use our Editor's ToolKit program, which already has them assigned). Here's the procedure:<\/p>\n
1. Click the \"Tools\" menu at the top of your Word window.<\/p>\n
2. Click \"Customize.\"<\/p>\n
3. Click the \"Keyboard\" tab or button.<\/p>\n
4. In the Categories list, find and click \"All Commands.\"<\/p>\n
5. In the Commands list, find and click the command, such as \"SentRight.\"<\/p>\n
6. With your cursor in the Press New Shortcut Key box, press the key combination you want to use. I'd recommend CTRL + ALT + RIGHT ARROW for SentRight and CTRL + ALT + LEFT ARROW for SentLeft, since these are probably not already in use on your computer.<\/p>\n
7. Make sure the \"Save Changes In\" box shows Normal.dot.<\/p>\n
8. Click the \"Assign\" button. (If you wanted to remove the key combination, you'd click the \"Remove\" button.)<\/p>\n
9. Click the \"Close\" button.<\/p>\n
That's it! Now you can merrily cruise from sentence to sentence as you edit your latest project.<\/p>\n
As you edit, you'll probably notice that you can't hold down the SHIFT key and then select a sentence using the keys you've just defined. The commands, for some reason, don't allow it. However, you can overcome this problem with two other commands:<\/p>\n
SentRightExtend<\/p>\n
SentLeftExtend<\/p>\n
You can assign these commands to some other key combinations. How about:<\/p>\n
SHIFT + CTRL + ALT + RIGHT ARROW<\/p>\n
SHIFT + CTRL + ALT + LEFT ARROW<\/p>\n
That should make the commands work just the way you'd want them to.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
_________________________________________<\/p>\n
READERS WRITE<\/p>\n
After reading last week's article, \"The Case against Caps,\" Steve Dobney wrote:<\/p>\n
\"As a keen keyboard shortcut user I make great use of Shift + F3 (on the Mac) to toggle between capitalisation options. I think it's the same for Windows.\"<\/p>\n
Yes, it is. Thanks for the great tip, Steve.<\/p>\n
Bruce White wrote:<\/p>\n
\"I have attached to a button the Change Case item from the Format menu. It changes the capitalization of selected text each time it is pressed to the next one in the sequence: UPPERCASE, lowercase, and Title Case.<\/p>\n
\"For some reason Sentence case is not in the sequence. I suspect that you are meant to change it all to lower then select the first word and change it to title case.<\/p>\n
\"Colin Wheildon's Type & Layout from Strathmoor Press (ISBN 0-9624891-5-8) has a bit to say against using uppercase. From his Table 5 on page 67:<\/p>\n
lowercase Capitals<\/p>\n
Roman old style 92% 69%<\/p>\n
Roman modern 89% 71%<\/p>\n
Sans serif 90% 57%<\/p>\n
Optima 85% 56%<\/p>\n
Square serif 64% 44%<\/p>\n
\"These numbers are for legibility of printed material.<\/p>\n
\"Note that the book includes the methodology used so that anyone wanting to see what results happen for online can follow the same approach.\"<\/p>\n