Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 17: customizing office 633

Tip: You can use this technique to reset any of the factory toolbars, too. On the Tools→Customize→Toolbars

tab, just turn on the checkbox next to the toolbar you want to restore, and then click Reset.

Reassigning Key Combinations

A staggering number of Office commands can be triggered by pressing an equally

staggering number of keyboard shortcuts. The only problem arises when you dis-

cover that Microsoft has chosen something bizarre (like Option-c-R for Thesau-

rus) instead of something more natural (like c-T).

The good news is that you can reassign key combinations for any menu command—

in Word and Excel, anyway. You can’t fiddle with the keyboard commands in

PowerPoint or Entourage. (But hey, in Office 2001 you couldn’t change key com-

mands in Excel either, so at least Microsoft is making some progress.)

To begin, choose Tools→Customize. In the Customize dialog box, click the Key-

board button.

Now the Customize Keyboard window appears (see Figure 17-4). It works much

like the toolbar-editing dialog box described earlier in this chapter. At left, click a

command category; at right, click the name of the command you want to reassign.

(After clicking or tabbing into one of these lists, you can jump to a particular cat-

egory or command by typing the first couple letters of its name.)

Figure 17-4:

Here, the Spelling and Grammar

command (which Word calls

ToolsProofing) is being given

another keyboard shortcut—

Option-

c

-S. Word warns that

Option-

c

-S is already in use by

another command (“DocSplit,”

which splits the document

window into two panes); if you

don’t care, just click Assign.

Redesigning

Your Menus

634 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

After highlighting the command for which you’d like to change or add a key combi-

nation, click in the box beneath the “Press new shortcut key” field. Now press the

keys you’d like to use as the new key combo, using any combination of the Shift, c,

Option, and Control keys along with a letter, Fkey, or number key.

If that keystroke already “belongs” to another command in the Office X program

you’re using, the Customize dialog box shows you which command has it (Figure

17-4). To reassign that keystroke to the new command anyway, click the Assign but-

ton. To keep the current setting, press Delete, and then try another keystroke.

Obviously, you can’t have two commands linked to a single keystroke. However, you

can create more than one keyboard shortcut for a single command. For instance, in

Word X, both c-B and Shift-c-B are assigned to Bold.

Tip: If you find yourself frequently triggering some command accidentally, you may want to remove its

assigned keystroke. To do so, click the command name in the list, highlight the keystroke in the “Current

keys” list, and then click the Remove button. Click OK to save the changes.

If you don’t like the key combinations that you’ve edited, you can always reset them

by clicking the Reset All button in the lower-right portion of the dialog box.

Faster Keyboard Reassignment in Word

Word offers a shortcut for assigning a keyboard shortcut

to a menu: Press Option-c and the + sign on your nu-

meric keypad (at the right side of your keyboard). The

mouse pointer changes into a large c symbol.

Now click the toolbar button, or choose the menu com-

mand, for which you want to set up a keystroke. A special

keyboard-reassignment box appears, looking something

like the one in Figure 17-4. Just press the keystroke you

want as described above. You’ve just saved yourself sev-

eral steps.

GEM IN THE ROUGH

Reassigning Key

Combinations