Inventory Your Keyboard Shortcuts and Clear Out the Useless Ones
Help! Something happened to my shortcut keys in Word. They got all botched up. I know how to reset them, so that’s not my question. But what I discovered when I started to reset them was that I have way more shortcuts than I thought I had— and for tasks I never used and never will use. It’ll take me hours of searching to uncover all of them, and I believe I must do that because I’m afraid if I don’t clean up the mess, I may later innocently create shortcuts that could short-circuit the shortcuts that I want and need. What can I do?
Relax. Multiple shortcut keys present no danger to your system. Both sets of keys simply will be able to trigger the shortcut without a problem. But if all those shortcuts really bother you, you can reset the entire system and just add the shortcuts you want.
To do that in Word, click on Tools, Customize… and then on Keyboard… at the bottom of the screen to evoke the Customize Keyboard screen (see screenshot on above).
Clicking on Reset All will clear your custom keyboard shortcuts. Now you can enter whatever shortcuts you wish. When you’re done, I’d suggest you do a printout of them so you can have a handy record whenever you need it. To get a printout of everything you added, click on File, Print and under Print what, scroll down to Key assignments and click on OK (see screenshot below).
