Word styles key command

Word styles key command
Mac Tip #240/26-April-2006

I’m writing a book right now with Maria Langer. It’s called WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide and should be available at about the end of May. WordPress is thoroughly excellent software used for making certain types of websites, especially, but not only blogs.

Maria and I have a Microsoft Word template we use, with various styles all set up.

Any serious writer will know about using paragraph styles in Microsoft Word: you type your material, select headings, for example and instead of making them bold, you choose Heading 2 from the Styles pop-up. That makes them bold, and perhaps changes the font or spacing or other characteristics as well.

It also has the bonus effect of allowing you to see an outline of your document.

I quite often have to apply character styles to certain words or phrases. A character style is a set of styles that apply only to individual letters or words and not to whole paragraphs.

For example, I might write the following sentence, and only the words I’ve marked out here between the quote marks are supposed to be in a different font and bold: You might call the file containing the AdSense code: adsense.php.

When I started writing I’d select that section of text, move my cursor up to the Style pop-up menu and choose the style named MyCode. Pretty soon though I grew tired of doing that a couple of times per sentence and I remembered that you can set up your own key commands in MS Word.

Here’s how for Word 2004, and using the example of a character style called MyCode.

Open a Word document that uses the styles to which you want to give keyboard commands. Go to the Format menu. Select Style….

In the Style window that appears select MyCode from the list of Styles at the left, then click the Modify… button. The Modify Style window appears, with a pop-up button at bottom left which will show the word Format.

Click the Format pop-up and choose Shortcut key…. The Customize Keyboard window appears.

Make sure the cursor is in the Press new shortcut key field and press the keys you wish to use in future to assign this MyCode style to selected text. I chose Control Option fullstop. Then click the Assign button.

Complete your task by clicking OK, OK and Apply in the various windows.

Now try it out: select some text and press Control Option fullstop, or whatever shortcut you chose. The selected text should change its appearance to reflect the characteristics assigned to your chosen styles.