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:

Action	Windows Shortcut	Mac Shortcut
Copy selected text	Ctrl + C	Cmd + C
Cut selected text	Ctrl + X	Cmd + X
Paste selected text	Ctrl + V	Cmd + V
Undo an action	Ctrl + Z	Cmd + Z
Redo an action	Ctrl + Y	Cmd + Y
Select all text	Ctrl + A	Cmd + A

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:

Action	Windows Shortcut	Mac Shortcut
En dash	Alt + 0150	Opt + –
Em dash	Alt + 0151	Opt + Shift + –
á	Alt + 160	a + ‘
é	Alt + 0201	e + ‘
í	Alt + 161	i + ‘
ó	Alt + 162	o + ‘
ú	Alt + 163	u + ‘

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.

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.

Action	Windows Shortcut	Mac Shortcut
Open a new document	Ctrl + N	Cmd + N
Open an existing document	Ctrl + O	Cmd + O
Close a specific document	Ctrl + W	Cmd + W
Save a document	Ctrl + S	Cmd + S
Save as	F12	Cmd + Shift + S
Print	Ctrl + P	Cmd + P
Open print preview	Ctrl + F2	Cmd + P
Toggle ribbon	Ctrl + F1	Opt + Cmd + R
Cancel	Esc	Esc

Text-Level MS Word Keyboard Shortcuts

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

Action	Windows Shortcut	Mac Shortcut
Move cursor one character to left or right	Left and right arrows	Left and right arrows
Move cursor one word left or right	Ctrl + left or right arrow	Opt + left or right arrow
Move one paragraph up or down	Ctrl + up or down arrow	Cmd + up or down arrow
Move cursor to the end of a line	End	Cmd + right arrow
Move cursor to the start of a line	Home	Cmd + left arrow
Move cursor to end of a doc	Ctrl + End	Cmd + Fn + right arrow
Move cursor to beginning of a doc	Ctrl + Home	Cmd + Fn + left arrow
Increase or decrease font size by one pt.	Ctrl + [ or ]	Cmd + [ or ]
Toggle bold, italics, or underscore	Ctrl + B, I, or U	Cmd + B, I, or U
Apply subscript	Ctrl + =	Cmd + =
Apply superscript	Ctrl + Shift +	Cmd + Shift =
Align text center, left, or right	Ctrl + E, L, or R	Cmd + E, L, or R
Insert hyperlink in selected text	Ctrl + K	Cmd + K
Search the document	Ctrl + F	Cmd + F

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.