May 8, 2008

Quick Paragraph Relocation in Word

Do you sometimes find yourself highlighting entire paragraphs in an MS Word document for relocation?

(As we discussed yesterday, every time you hit the Enter key, you've finished a paragraph and are creating a new one, so just remember that "paragraphs" in Word could be as small as a single word in a bulleted list).

So, what do you do?

I bet I can guess! You first highlight the entire paragraph, then you use the mouse to grab and hold the paragraph and while still using the mouse, you run the pointer up and down the document to find the "right place" to drop the paragraph.

Then when you need to move something else, you start the process all over again. Am I right?

Whew!

That's a lot of repetition.

Well, here's a mouseless, three key solution to the situation that works so much better!

The next time you need to move an entire paragraph, try this little trick:

Put your cursor in the paragraph you want to move.
Now, hold down the Alt + Shift keys.

(Here's the move. Don't blink or you'll miss it!)

Press the up or down arrow in whichever direction you need to move your paragraph. That's it!

Each time you press an arrow key (while still holding Alt + Shift), your text is moved one paragraph up or down.

To move something a long way, simply hold down the arrow key and let it go!

For those of you who are already asking what makes this so different from the recent F2 trick I showed you, the answer lies within the highlighting and in the amount of text it moves. First, the F2 trick only moved the highlighted text. That tip never even instructed you to highlight! Word automatically grabs the whole paragraph and takes it along for the ride. On the other hand, if you have a couple of consecutive paragraphs to move together, you can highlight part of each one and use this trick, which will move both of them at the same time.

It's viagra online way easier than any other paragraph moving trick I've ever used!