Use these handy text editing shortcuts if you are editing a lot of documents

Selecting and editing text becomes much easier if you use these keyboard shortcuts.

It’s no secret that I love keyboard shortcuts.

It may seem hard to remember them, but if you put the effort into learning the most important ones you will save a lot of time every time you use them.

This is the productivity “hack” that I always try to push others to use.

So, in today’s post I’m going to make a list of the most important shortcuts you can use to select text, navigate inside a document, and edit or format text.

All the shortcuts below are universal keyboard shortcuts because they work in pretty much any Windows application. Learn them once and you can use them everywhere. What more can you ask for?

Navigate in documents using Ctrl and the arrow keys

You will move much faster and precisely inside a document using these:

• Left / Right arrow keys - use them to move the cursor one character at once, to the left or to the right.

• Up / Down arrow keys - use them to move one line up or one line down, maintaining the approximate cursor position inside the new line of text.

• Ctrl + Left / Right arrow keys - move the cursor one word to the left or to the right.

• Ctrl + Up / Down arrow keys - move the cursor one paragraph up or down. In bullet or numbered lists, it will jump one item, not the entire list.

• Page down - moves the cursor one page down from its current position.

• Page up - moves the cursor one page up from its current position.

• Home - moves the cursor to the start of the current line.

• End - moves the cursor to the end of the current line.

• Ctrl + Home - moves the cursor to the beginning of the document.

• Ctrl + End - moves the cursor to the end of the document.

• Ctrl + F - finds given text in the current document.

• Ctrl + H - replaces given text in the current document with a new string.

Select text using Shift and the arrow keys

Before talking about keyboard shortcuts for selecting text I think it’s important to know that you can also use the mouse pretty handily:

• Double click - will select the word that you clicked.

• Triple click - will select the entire paragraph.

That triple click can be pretty hard to master, but it’s handy in a lot of scenarios.

Now to the shortcuts:

• Shift + Left / Right arrow keys - selects one character to the left or to the right.

• Shift + Up / Down arrow keys - selects all text between the current cursor position to the same position on the top or bottom line of text.

• Shift + Page up / Page down - selects all text between the current cursor position and the same position one page up or down.

• Shift + Home / End - selects all text between the current cursor position and the start or end of the line.

• Ctrl + Shift + Home / End - selects all text between the current cursor position and the start or end of the document.

• Ctrl + Shift + Left / Right arrow keys - selects one word to the left or right of the cursor position.

• Ctrl + Shift + Up / Down arrow keys - selects all text between the current cursor position and the start or end of the paragraph.

• Ctrl + A - selects all elements in the document, including text.

You can keep pressing these shortcuts to extend the selection if there are still items in the direction you are selecting text.

Pressing Backspace or Delete after selecting text will delete the selection.

Shortcuts for editing and formatting text

You already know that Backspace and Delete will erase characters to the left and right of the cursor. But did you know you can use these keys together with Ctrl?

• Ctrl + Backspace - deletes one word to the left of the cursor.

• Ctrl + Delete - deletes one word to the right of the cursor.

For quick text formatting use these:

• Ctrl + B - Switches the selected text between bold, normal font weight.

• Ctrl + I - Switches the selected text between normal and italic style.

• Ctrl + U - Switches the selected text between normal underline decoration style.

If you use these formatting shortcuts without selecting any text what happens is the style of what you are going to type next at the cursor position will be changed. Obviously, these formatting shortcuts only work in document editors that support text formatting, so definitely not in Notepad. 

Finally:

• Ctrl + K - opens a dialog where you can insert an URL with the selected text as anchor for this link.

You will need to get used to these shortcuts, and I can tell you from experience that you will make mistakes, so don’t forget to use Ctrl + Z o to Undo and Ctrl + Y to Redo your actions.

Previous tips you may have missed

One very quick way to open recently accessed documents for apps pinned to the Windows taskbar is to use jump lists. This is one cool, but often overrated Windows feature. Note: it only works with apps that support this feature.