Before I begin, I wish a happy birthday to longtime Shelf Life–reader and even-longer-time English-language user my Grandpa, whose birthday is tomorrow!
Welcome to the final Shelf Life of bare-legs season. Monday is Labor Day and the next Shelf Life comes on the day after Labor Day, which is the much-more-important opening-of-tights-wearing-season day. This is similar to how, in Pennsylvania, the fourth Thursday of November each year is Thanksgiving, and that’s great and all, but then, the day after, is the first day of deer-hunting season and that’s what everybody is really looking forward to. Thanksgiving in those parts does have Turkey but it also has a lot of bright orange vests and oiling of guns. Likewise, I spend Labor Day washing, drying, and organizing my tights. You will not see these knees again till Memorial Day.
Tuesday’s Shelf Life was some pro-tips for MS Word users, but those were the beginner pro tips. Today is the advanced pro-tips. These tips are guaranteed to make your Word-using life easier and more efficient or your money back. Haha just kidding, Shelf Life is free. You should probably get paid by me to read it. So in this case if you don’t find the tips helpful you would have to give my money back to me. Or possibly I’d have to give you more money, I confused myself.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Next up: Keyboard shortcuts. Word has a ton of keyboard shortcuts already built in. For instance, in Word, if you would like to use the em dash—every writer’s favorite and most abused punctuation mark—you do not need to find it in the character map and painstakingly copy and paste it into your document, nor do you have to use the Windows system keyboard shortcut—that’s ALT+0151 for the uninitiated—you can just use Word’s built-in shortcut by holding down the Ctrl and Alt keys (those are the Command and Option keys on a Mac, I think) and pressing the minus sign on your numpad. This doesn’t just work in Word, by the way, but in most MS Office applications, including Outlook.
What if you don’t have a numpad, though? Many laptop users do not. Well, first and ideally, you could build your own custom USB keypad with whatever keys you want, as I often think of doing. I would put the em dash and en dash on there, as well as the lowercase letter e with acute accent (é), the Greek letter mu (µ) and several other Greek letters I use frequently, the plus-minus sign (±), and a bunch of mathematical operators I use and always have to go hunting for. Clearly, I have put a lot of thought into building a custom USB keyboard extension. If I haven’t done it yet, you probably are not going to do it except maybe as your last resort.
What you can do instead for way less effort is create a custom keyboard shortcut, also known as a keybind. To do this, begin by opening the File menu in Word and choosing “Options.” From the Options popup window choose “Customize Ribbon.” At the bottom of the left column of the resulting “Customize the Ribbon and keyboard shortcuts” dialogue is a button to customize your keyboard shortcuts.
Clicking this button brings up a dialogue with selectable categories on the left and the commands that fall under that category on the right. As you click to different categories, different commands will appear. If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the “Categories” list you’ll find “Common Symbols.” Open that up.
Four items down this list is the trusty em dash (—). If you click on the em dash entry, you will see that the “Current keys” box populated with the existing keyboard shortcut, Ctrl + Alt + Minus. If you don’t have a numpad you don’t have a minus key, but you do have a key that makes a hyphen (or an underscore if you hold shift). It’s to the right of your zero key. If you put your mouse cursor in the empty “Press new shortcut key” field and hold down Ctrl + Alt and type the hyphen using that key, a new keyboard shortcut is born:
As you can see in this screenshot, Ctrl + Alt + hyphen is not currently assigned to any shortcut (right below the “Current keys” box). This means you’re not unassigning an existing keyboard shortcut to create this new one.
Custom Templates
The topic is now switching from keybinds to custom templates, but I’m continuing the same line of thought—from the same screenshot—as above. You can see there’s an option of which document to save your keyboard shortcut to. Your options will be “Normal.dotm” or the current document in which you are working.
Normal.dotm is the default MS Word template in your instance of Word. Anytime you open a fresh, blank document and you do not choose a specific template, the template that opens is Normal.dotm. If you save the shortcut to Normal.dotm, then the shortcut will work in any document you create using Normal.dotm in the future. So: Use Normal.dotm to save keyboard shortcuts you would like to be universal to all your Word documents (going forward).
What if you don’t want to change Normal.dotm but you want to have a separate template for a specific use? Follow these steps:
Open a new Word document from the default template (Normal.dotm).
Create your desired keyboard shortcuts.
Save this empty document as a template using File > Save As > Word Template (*.dotx).
Give this template a descriptive name like “Science Writing” or “Copyediting” or whatever you intend to use it for. In the future, when you wish to use the template, create a new file by opening the File menu and choosing “New” and then toggling from “Office” templates to “Personal” templates: You’ll see your custom templates there and can open a new file using that template.
Custom templates can be used for all kinds of things. Fiction writers who have submitted work to journals or agents for consideration are probably familiar with Shunn manuscript format. Shunn is an industry-standard manuscript format that many professionals will request authors use when submitting. Shunn has requirements for things like margin size, font size and face, running headers, and the information that must appear on the first page of the manuscript.
To that end, I have a Word template called “Shunn.dotx.” Here’s how to make it.
In a new Word file, apply these settings:
Layout > Margins > 1 inch on each side
Open the “Styles” pane and “Modify” the “Normal” style: Times New Roman, 12 point/
Still in the “Normal” style modification window, use the Format dropdown on the bottom left and choose “Paragraph”; set indentation to Special = “First line” by “0.5.”
Still in the “Paragraph” window, set line spacing to “Double”; make sure “Before” and “After” are both “0 pt”
Insert > Header > Edit Header. Inside the header at the top of page 1, type: “[Your Last Name] / TITLE /”. Check the “Different First Page” box. After the second slash use Insert > Page Number > Current Position.
In the upper left of the first page add your name and contact details.
Move your cursor halfway down the first page and create a title placeholder in the center of the page, for instance: Title Title
One line below your title placeholder, add the byline: By Your Pen Name
Save as Template > Shunn.dotx.
(You will need to customize further depending upon whether you’re using Shunn for a short story or a novel.) In the future, new writing projects created using Shunn.dotx will have Shunn manuscript format automatically applied for you—you only have to fill in the placeholders. And, you know, write the story.
Macros
A macro is like a keyboard shortcut on steroids. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s like a little program you can create and run right inside Word. A macro is a command or series of commands that you create yourself and launch using a button or keybind. Let’s walk through how to make a simple one.
First, note that macros, like keybinds, are saved to a template. You can create one and save it to Normal.dotm or you can save your macro to a specific template. Note that if you create a macro in Normal.dotm, then open a blank document and save that blank document as a new template.dotx, the macro will be carried over to that new template.
Let’s say I don’t like to draft in Word, I only move my projects into Word after they’re complete and I want to get them ready for submission. What I’m going to do, then, is create a macro that will format my text to Shunn manuscript format when I execute the macro.
On the “View” tab of the ribbon, open up the “Macros” menu. If Macros isn’t there, you can add it to your Ribbon using File > Options > Customize Ribbon. I’m going to start by using “View Macros” to see what’s available. You probably have none (I have none). Close this and use “Record Macro” from the same menu. Name your macro (I’m calling mine “Shunn”) and add a description if you wish (“Convert document to Shunn format.”). You can add a keyboard shortcut to trigger the macro or you can create a button for it to add to your toolbar. (I didn’t do either, I’m using the secret third option—use the “Run” key on the Macros menu.)
You are now recording!
While recording, I stepped through all the steps I described above in the template section: I set my margins, edited my “Normal” text style in the style pane, added a header, typed in my personal information in the upper left of page 1, added a placeholder approx word count on the upper right of page 1, then skipped down to the middle of the page and added a title placeholder and then my byline.
When I finished, I went back to the Macro button in the View tab and chose “Stop Recording.” I used “View Macros” again and my Shunn macro was there.
To test it, I opened a fresh document. I grabbed a few paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum as my “story” and pasted it into the new, blank document. I made sure my “story” was formatted in “Normal” font style and made sure my cursor was at the beginning of the text. Running the macro converted the whole thing to almost-perfect Shunn format for me. I had to fiddle around a bit with the order in which I applied the formatting for the macro to work perfectly. But it did work and it was really easy.
If you’re willing to dip a toe into Visual Basic you can do a lot more with macros, but even using the straightforward “Record Macro” function you can do a lot.
Any time there’s something you do over and over again in Word that’s taking away from your precious words-per-minute writing speed, there’s probably a way to keybind it, macro it, or build it into a template so you can spend every single microsecond (that’s a µs for my fellow Greek letter fans) on what’s important, which is writing.
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