IT PAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR

WORD PROCESSING POWER

BASED ON KAY MCBURNEY’S ARTICLE

Group Members•Laura Marín•Daniela Briceño•Sara Grand•Mariliam Rodriguez

As translators, we have to spend a lot of hours a day sitting in front of a computer . According to an article written by Kay McBurney for the ITI Bulletin in 2003, improving your skills on word processor programs, will help you become more efficient when working on any assignment. If you want to learn more about this, continue reading and don’t go anywhere.

WHAT’S A KEYBOARD SHORCUT?

If you look up “Shortcut” in any dictionary, you will find the following definition:

“It’s a way of doing something quicker than the usual way.”

Among Windows Office Pack programs, there are a lot of different shortcuts that will make your work easier, if you don’t want to “wean yourself off using the mouse”, as McBurney says. First, let’s classify the different keyboard shortcuts, and then make a list of the most common ones.

CLICK ON ANY ONE OF THESE TO GET MORE INFO

Editing Shortcuts

Character Formatting Shortcuts

Navigation Shortcuts

Right-clicking Shortcuts

Miscellaneous Shortcuts

EDITING SHORTCUTS. USED TO EDIT DOCUMENTS QUICKLY, WITHOUT HAVING TO USE THE TOOLBAR.

Ctrl + X = Copy selected text. Ctrl + C = Cut selected text. Ctrl + V = Paste selected text. Ctrl + Z = Undo the last change you made. Esc = Cancel the current task. Ctrl + F = Open the “Find” dialog box. Ctrl + H = Open the “Replace” dialog box. F4 = Repeat the last action you performed. Shift+F4 = Repeat the current search operation,

or “Go To action”. F7 =Activate the spellchecker.

CHARACTER FORMATTING SHORTCUTS. USED TO CHANGE CHARACTER FORMAT QUICKLY.

Although clicking a toolbar button is faster than choosing a command on a menu, when keying a text it’s still far quicker not to use the mouse, instead use character formatting shortcuts. The most common ones are:Ctrl + B = To apply “Bold” format to the text. Ctrl + I* = To apply “Italics” format to the text.Ctrl + U* = To underline the selected text.Shift + F3 = To change the case of the selected case. There are three possibilities, Upper Case, Lower Case, and Initial Capital.

* The shortcuts might change depending on the language the program is set up. For example, if the program is in Spanish, use Ctrl + K and Ctrl + S to apply “Italics” format, and to underline the text respectively.

NAVIGATION SHORTCUTS

Apart from the cursor keys and adjacent Home, End, PgUp, PgDn keys already provided on the keyboard, there are many handy shortcuts for moving around the document. Here some of the ones McBurney finds most useful.Ctrl + Home = Go to top of document.Ctrl + End = Go to end of document.Shift + F5 = Go to where you last made an edit in the document (cycles through last 3 positions).Alt + Tab = Switch between windowsCtrl + G/F5 = Open “Go To” dialog box.

RIGHT-CLICKING SHORTCUTS

If there’s no keyboard shortcut, the next fastest way of accessing a command is to right-click with your mouse. This brings up a so called context-sensitive or shortcut menu listing the actions available to you. This is particularly useful for changing paragraph or font formatting on the fly. The actions listed will depend on what you have selected or the current location of your insertion point, ie right-clicking in a table will offer different options that right-clicking on a normal paragraph.

MISCELLANEOUS SHORTCUTS

Ins key = It’s the quickest way of toggling between Insert mode and Overtype mode.

Ctrl + A* = Select the whole document. Ctrl + O = Open a file. Alt + F4 = Exit Word Ctrl + F4 = Close the active document,

without exiting Word.

There are a lot of different shortcuts you can use, in order to access and edit your documents in a short time. It’s important to remember that some of these shortcuts might change their position, depending on the language of the program you are using. In our opinion, this article written by Kay McBurney is really helpful, because being a good translator is not only producing a good version of the text, this is the most important aspect of our work, but the improvement of our word processing power will help us become more efficient and make the best of our working time.

REFERENCES

MCBURNEY, Kay. (2003) It Pays to Improve Your Word Processing Power. ITI Bulletin. January-February. Institute of Translating and Interpreting. London, UK.

We hope you have enjoyed our presentation, in case you need any information, you can contact us:

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