15 Most Common, Basic Microsoft Word Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts can greatly enhance your typing speed and help you type much faster.

Which in turn helps push up your productivity, focus on what is going on in your mind without being bothered by your typing skills (or, the lack of them) and minimize the amount of time lost in looking for various options in Microsoft word.

15 Most Common Microsoft Word Keyboard Shortcuts

There are too many keyboard shortcuts available to us. Trying to memorize them all can indeed be a painful task, no matter how much we use our keyboard during the course of an average day.

Here are the 15 most common and basic keyboard shortcuts in MS Word.

All of us who need to type a lot would do well to remember them.

Knowing these shortcut will help you minimize the usage of your mouse/ touch pad though you are obviously free to go to the Menu Bar at the top and see all the commands.

S.No.	Shortcut	Function
1.	Ctrl+N	Opens a New Word Document
2.	Ctrl+W	Closes the open Word Document, without quitting MS Word
3.	Ctrl+S	Saves the open Word Document
4.	Ctrl+A	Selects all the text and images from the selected word document/ window
5.	Ctrl+C	Copies the selected text
6.	Ctrl+X	Cuts the selected text
7.	Ctrl+V	Pastes/ Inserts the text which was selected earlier
8.	Ctrl+Z	Undo the last action
9.	Ctrl+Y	Redo
10.	Ctrl+B	Bolds the selected text or removes the Bold formatting
11.	Ctrl+I	Italicizes the selected text or removes italics
12.	Ctrl+U	Underlines the selected text or removes the underline
13.	Ctrl+F	Helps search for a specified word/ text in a Word Document
14.	Ctrl+D	Open Font preferences window- choose the font style, color, effects, size, etc.
15.	Ctrl+K	Insert a link

Besides the 15 most commonly used and needed MS word keyboard shortcuts listed above, there are some other shortcuts too which can make typing less tedious.

15 Not so Common MS Word Keyboard Shortcuts

As said earlier, though it is not easy to memorize them all and remember them by reading this list once, keeping them in mind would surely be of great help.

Here are 15 not so commonly used keyboard shortcuts:

S. No.	Shortcut	Function
1.	Ctrl+]	Increase size of selected text by 1 point
2.	Ctrl+[	Decrease size of selected text by 1 point
3.	Shift+F3	Change the case of letters i.e. upper case to lower case & vice versa
4.	Ctrl+E	Aligns the selected text to the centre of the page
5.	Ctrl+J	Justifies the selected text
6.	Ctrl+L	Left aligns the selected text
7.	Ctrl+R	Right aligns the selected text
8.	Ctrl+1	Single spaces lines
9.	Ctrl+2	Double spaces lines
10.	Ctrl+5	1.5 line spacing
11.	Ctrl+T	To create a hanging indent
12.	Ctrl+ Shift+T	To reduce a hanging indent
13.	F5	Open the “Find & Replace” option in MS Word
14.	F7	Check the spellings and grammar of the selected text
15.	F12	Runs a Thesaurus check of the selected word

Conclusion

Try to retain as many shortcuts as possible from this list of 15 most commonly used and needed MS Word keyboard shortcuts and the 15 not so common ones.

If possible, store this list on your desktop and try to memorize ONE new shortcut everyday till you know them all.

It is not an impossible task but will go a great way in helping you improve your typing speed.