Useful Keyboard Shortcuts for Proofreaders

If you’re a freelance proofreader, you’ll likely spend a lot of time using a laptop or computer. And knowing some keyboard shortcuts can make your life much easier when proofreading a document. Plus, the faster you can proofread, the more you can earn! In this post, we’ll take you through a few useful keyboard shortcuts, both generally and in Microsoft Word, to make proofreading smoother and faster.

Please note that the use of the plus symbol in the shortcuts described in this post refers to sequences of keys that you should press simultaneously (not that you need to press the plus key on your keyboard).

General Keyboard Shortcuts

Whether you use a laptop or a desktop computer, there are some shortcuts that work on text in most applications. Proofreaders should get familiar with the following shortcuts:

When you’re proofreading text, it’s also handy to know some shortcuts for special characters like en and em dashes and letters with accents (also known as diacritics). Some of these include:

However, the shortcuts above for Windows only work on keyboards with numeric keypads.

If you don’t have a numeric keypad, select these characters straight from the special characters menu by using the shortcut Windows key + . or Ctrl + Cmd + Space bar, or selecting Insert > Symbols in MS Word.

The symbols menu in Windows.

MS Word Keyboard Shortcuts

Since you’ll likely do a significant amount of your proofreading work in Word, it’s also worth knowing a few shortcuts here. We’ve split these into two categories:

1. Document-level (keyboard shortcuts related to documents as a whole)
2. Text-level (shortcuts that you can use to edit the text in a document)

Read on to find out more about these.

Document-Level MS Word Keyboard Shortcuts

These are shortcuts for saving, opening, and closing documents.

Text-Level MS Word Keyboard Shortcuts

These shortcuts are for moving the cursor around the document, formatting fonts, applying superscript, aligning text, etc.

And remember: you can also create custom shortcuts in MS Word.

Proofreading in Microsoft Word

Discover how to make the best use of Word as a proofreader in our Becoming A Proofreader course. Sign up for a free trial to see how it works.

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How to Make an Em Dash in Microsoft Word Windows vs. Mac: Which Is Better for Proofreading? Spellcheck and Proofreading Software Shortcuts and Time-Savers to Avoid