Word keyboard shortcuts

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I’ve currently got a keyboard shortcut for the currently selected Font Color, but I find I need more control. I create numerous documents with 3 different font colors, so I’d like to have separate shortcuts for each of the 3 colors. ie Ctrl-1 for red, Ctrl-2 for blue, etc. Is this possible?

Thanks

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You can create a style and assign a keystroke to that style. Ctrl 1, 2, 5 are defined presently to give you single, double and 1.5 spacing.

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That’s an interesting idea. Is there a way to create a style such that applying it will not change the font type, will ony change the font color?

Thanks

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If you create a Character style (as opposed to a Paragraph style) you can use it to apply font colors without changing any other formatting properties of the text it’s applied to. When defining a character style for this purpose, you can specify a font color and leave everything else undefined.

Gary

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Character styles are handy for identifying otherwise invisible attributes as well. I often work with documents that contain lots of different foreign words: by tagging words and phrases with character styles like “Spanish” or “French”, I can assign the appropriate language for spell checking — but also, I can assign color to differentiate the terms during editing. Spanish words can be green; French in blue etc. I also have character styles for URLs (to display in purple with spell check turned off), email addresses and acronyms. An added bonus is that it is easy to extract all of a character style (use Find All, then Copy), so you can pull the elements out for more efficient proofreading or verification.

As an alternative to keyboard shortcuts, consider making a custom toolbar, and use the color in a custom button.

Edited addition: I should have mentioned that I use two different style sheets. One is for editing and draft stages, with the character styles showing the colors and custom edit toolbars; the other is for final production, with the colors set to black and the edit toolbars turned off. When I need to re-edit an already-published document, attaching the EditStage version of the template makes all the colors pop up again.

JudyL’s comment below is worth noting, but if the colors are turned on, a user is less likely to extend a style by accident. This has always been an issue with invisible attributes like Language and Keep conditions — and is one of the main reasons I use color to make them visible.

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These are great suggestions – thanks for posting them!

Gary

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One note of caution about character styles — if you are sharing your documents with anyone unfamiliar with such styles, they may well, unknowingly, continue to type in that area of the text with the style still attached, but they will likely hard format it to not be your purple polka dots anymore. And you end up with miles and miles of unintentional character style underlying hard formatting.

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Another way to do this is to create a macro for each task (e.g., Macro1==apply red to selected text, Macro2==apply blue to selected text, etc), then assign whatever keyboard shortcut to you want to each macro.

It’s easy to create macros using the Record Macro item on the Tools>Macro menu (that’s from memory…I’m at a Linux computer right now, so can’t check the actual menu choice).

To have those macros and shortcuts available in every document, you need to import then into your normal.dot template.

This is a bit more complicated than other solutions perhaps, but macros give you a lot of control over what you want to do, so thought I would throw the idea out there anyway.

Alan

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Thanks to all for the ideas. I am working through them now.

If I select a few words and apply a character style that I created for a font color, it works nicely.

But I notice that if I start typing using a character style that I created for a specific font color, it is somewhat hard to turn it off. If I click on Normal style, the font still remains colored.
Does this mean that Character styles override Paragraph styles even if the Paragraph Style as applied afterwards?

And the only way I have found to make the color go back to black is to click Clear All in the Styles window, but this removes all the styles which is not what I want.

So how do I get back to black font color without using Clear All?

Thanks

Edit: I just found the Default Paragraph Font character style and applying it will cause the subsequent lines to appear as black.
Is that the recommended way to get out of the custom character style?
Do I need to use a Character Style to do this because a Paragraph Style does not override a Character Style?

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This is an interesting problem: unlike Bold, Italic, Underline and other toggle buttons, Word doesn’t supply an easy way to “turn off” the application of a character style. As you note, applying the default style probably is the closest thing. I don’t see an easy way to create a keyboard shortcut for that style, so you might have to associate a keyboard shortcut with a macro that applies that style.

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This is an interesting problem: unlike Bold, Italic, Underline and other toggle buttons, Word doesn’t supply an easy way to “turn off” the application of a character style. As you note, applying the default style probably is the closest thing. I don’t see an easy way to create a keyboard shortcut for that style, so you might have to associate a keyboard shortcut with a macro that applies that style.

I did find a way to create a keyboard shortcut. The way I usually do it (right click on the style and select Modify>Format) would not work. But if I added the style to the Quick Style Gallery, then I could right click on it there and Modify works.

One other question that has come up now. How do I delete a character style I’ve created from the template? All the ways I’ve tried only delete it from the current document, it still appears when I create a new document.

Thanks

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How do I delete a character style I’ve created from the template? All the ways I’ve tried only delete it from the current document, it still appears when I create a new document.

If you open the template file directly you should be able to edit the style out of the template.

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Word doesn’t supply an easy way to “turn off” the application of a character style

I’d have sworn that just pressing Ctrl-Spacebar cleared any character style. Can be pressed after typing the last “character-styled” character desired (when typing a new string), or can be pressed for a selection of existing “character-styled” text. Also clears other hard character formatting of course.

Judy

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Under View in the menu bar, select Toolbars. A new unnamed toolbar shows up. Arrow down to Customize. Then under Options, select Customize. Then select Commands–>Under Categories, select Format. Scroll down to select Font Color, and drag it to the new tool bar, which I named Color. When you use the custom “Color” toolbar all the available colors pop-up beneath the button. Select the color you want for the words you want to color. When you want to undo or change the color, press the button again and select another color.

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Turning off a Character style can be done by pressing Ctrl-Space (which runs the ResetFont command). Via the styles interface you choose “Default Paragraph Font”.

This is the single biggest weakness of Character styles – it is treated the same as local formatting and doesn’t survive a reset to style definitions.

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Thanks, JudyL and Andrew. That does the trick.

And thanks, jscher. That works too.

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This is the single biggest weakness of Character styles – it is treated the same as local formatting and doesn’t survive a reset to style definitions.

I use character styles a lot but am not sure what you mean by “not surviving a reset” Andrew. Why is it different to what happens if you use Ctrl-Shift-N (Reset to Normal style) for paragraph styles?

Unlike local formatting, a character style will change everywhere if the style definition is altered — just as what happens with paragraph styles (and other style types). So by Word’s design, I would expect the character style to reset to the default font (just as a paragraph resets to Normal). I’m not sure this is a weakness, but perhaps I am missing something.

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Eric

When I want to be sure the text has no local formatting, I select it and use Ctrl-Space and Ctrl-Q which restores the paragraph style but removes the character style. There is no way that I know of to remove local formatting but retain the character style.

Resetting to the Normal paragraph style only changes the underlying paragraph style and doesn’t necessarily remove local formatting or character styles.

I agree that character styles CAN be useful if you have the rigour to avoid local formatting but most of my work is in dealing with documents from other authors and the only way I can be sure of consistent formatting is resetting character and paragraph formats.

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