In the Insert menu, choose Symbol, then More Symbols.In the new box, put your cursor under Press New Shortcut Key and hit Control-hyphen.****.Since we’re going to create a keyboard command for our dash, click on Keyboard.***.Type a name for your macro (without spaces: EnDash).In a Word document click on Record Macro on the Developer ribbon.Here’s how to make an en dash appear every time you type Control-hyphen: If you’ve never used the macro-recording tool in Word, this simple exercise will introduce you to your new favorite plaything.* It’s simply a matter of pressing Record and letting Word capture whatever steps you perform in your document before pressing Stop. Anything else will slow me down.Įnter the macro! In just a few easy steps, I can teach Word to do these things using a fun but powerful feature that lets nontechies combine a series of steps into a single command without knowing a Ø from a 1. I want to type Control-hyphen for an en dash and Control-Alt-hyphen for an em dash. But I work on a full-size keyboard at the office, and I want my home keyboard to behave the same way. I know that typing two hyphens will automate the creation of an em dash, for instance. (Fortunately, it’s not difficult to reassign Control-F to the Find function, once you figure out that the mischief-loving folks at Word have also renamed the Find function EditFind.)Ī drawback of my new laptop that I can’t blame on Microsoft is that it lacks a numeric keypad, so it’s impossible to type an en dash or em dash in Word in the way I’m used to. To a writer or copyeditor who has used Control-F hundreds of times a day for decades, it doesn’t really matter whether this is a genuine improvement or not: we hate it. In the version of Word for Windows 2010 installed on my new laptop, for instance, Control-F no longer brings up the Find box. In an effort to pretend that new versions of MS Word are improvements, Microsoft continues to foist meaningless, annoying changes on their users.
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June 2023
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