Tech and life

I’ve been using MS Word for about 10 years and thought I knew most of its important features, but I didn’t know about the Spike!  I found out about this great feature recently in a blog post on Help Desk Geek. It allows you to quickly rearrange non-contiguous blocks of text or other items in your Word document. Basically, instead of using the simple cut and paste (Ctrl X, Ctrl-V) which I’m sure you’re all familiar with, you can use Word’s in-built Spike feature to ‘multiple cut’ items and then paste them all in order in a single operation.

Let me explain. The Spike allows you to add multiple selections (by cutting, not copying) to Word’s clipboard in the order you want, then to paste them all at once. So for example if you have an unordered list of say references which you want in alphabetical order, you just cut each selection in turn in the order you want using Ctrl-F3. They are added in that order to the Spike. No need to paste items individually, just keep adding your selections to the Spike. When you’ve finished cutting the items, you paste them all at once at your insertion point using Ctrl-Shift-F3.  Everything is pasted in one operation with all the selections in the order in which they were cut.

Try it out and see what you think. Definitely a time saver if you find yourself frequently rearranging selections in Word. And this feature works in all versions of Word from 97 to 2010. These are the main features of Spike but for a full how-to on using it, head over to the Help Desk Geek post. And let us know how you use the Spike in the comments.

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Image credit: quinn.anya

If you spend a lot of time in Word like I do then quick access to commands is important. You can waste a lot of time moving around the ribbon. If you want to speed things up, rather than going through the ribbon to access commands which usually requires at least two clicks to get to your destination, you should look closely at the Quick Access Toolbar usually positioned at the top left of the screen next to the Office button. You can customise this toolbar and add all your frequently used commands. Using the drop-down bar at the end of the Quick Access Toolbar, navigate to More Commands. In the top drop-down box there you’ll probably see Popular Commands by default, but don’t be fooled here. You can change this to show All Commands and pick the ones you find most useful. Then click Add in the centre and they will be added to your customised bar layout on the right. You can rearrange them there using the arrows on the right.

Another tip is to use separators if you find the buttons on the final bar are too closely spaced. You’ll find Separators at the top of the menu of commands. You can also move the final toolbar above or below the ribbon again using the drop-down menu at the end of the toolbar.

Finally you can get quick keyboard access to this toolbar using the key combinations Alt-1, Alt-2, etc. for items from left to right on the toolbar.

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