Tip of the Week: 8 Keyboard Shortcuts to Help With Text Editing

Word processors are a part of office life, so it helps to know as much as you can about them. Today, we want to think about ways you can adjust text size, especially after you copy and paste content into a document. Not only will we cover how to do so as plain text, but also how to use keyboard shortcuts to increase or decrease text size and add special formatting without navigating clunky menus.

How to Copy and Paste as Plain Text

When you copy and paste as plain text, you’re essentially pasting text without any of its additional formatting.

Normally, all the bold, italics, underlines, and text sizes would remain, but when you copy and paste as plain text, you remove all of this. The text defaults to whatever format has already been configured in your document. Knowing this trick can save you a lot of time and frustration.

Here’s the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + V.

What happens when the text still needs some fine-tuning? There might be some other issues with the formatting of your current document that need to be addressed. Here are a couple other tips to help.

How to Increase or Decrease Text Size (With Keyboard Shortcuts)

Sure, you can use the dropdowns, but why do that when you can do so much more with just a couple of keystrokes?

First, you’ll want to highlight the text that needs adjustment. You can use the keyboard shortcuts once that’s done. These are the shortcuts that work in Microsoft Word, but Google Docs has different shortcuts that we will also highlight below.

• For Microsoft Word
  • Increase font size: Ctrl + ] (right bracket)
  • Decrease font size: Ctrl + [ (left bracket)
• For Google Docs
  • Increase font size: Ctrl + Shift + . (period)
  • Decrease font size: Ctrl + Shift + , (comma)

How to Add Special Formatting (With Keyboard Shortcuts)

Once you’ve got the text sizes all figured out, you might want to add back in some of the special formatting here and there. These are what we call “ol’ reliable” shortcuts that every employee and business owner should know how to use.

• Bold: Ctrl + B
• Italic: Ctrl + I
• Underline: Ctrl + U

To clear any text formatting on highlighted text, you can use the shortcut Ctrl + \\ (backslash) or Ctrl + Space, depending on the platform.

Did these tips help at all? Make sure you keep an eye out for more. We share ways employees and business owners can make the most of their technology regularly on our blog.