Tom’s Tech Tip: Two Easy MS Word Keyboard Shortcuts for Certified Legal Nurse Consultants

At the CLNC^® Certification Seminar while discussing Microsoft^® Word with a group of future Certified Legal Nurse Consultants, the conversation came around to highlighting and deleting (or moving) a sentence or paragraph in a document such as a legal nurse consulting case report. I asked the group how they cut and pasted the text and received the expected answer. “I take my mouse in hand, highlight the text and then click on the Scissors icon and then the Paste icon.”

While that’s certainly an acceptable way to select, cut and paste, there are faster ways than by taking your hand off the keyboard and reaching for your Human Interface Device (formal name for mouse). Every time you take your hands off the keyboard you lose precious seconds and over a day, month, year and your legal nurse consulting career, I calculate that using your mouse to copy and paste cuts a full year off your life.

Here’s a three-step process that is a far easier way to cut/delete and paste text:

Highlight the text by placing your cursor at the beginning (or end) of the text you want to cut or move and then while holding down your Shift key hit the arrow (left, right, up or down) in the direction you want move. That will highlight anything from one word or an entire paragraph.
When you’re ready to cut hit Ctrl-X, copy hit Ctrl-C or delete hit Delete.
To paste the text into a new location, move the cursor to the insertion point and hit Ctrl-V to paste the cut or copied text.

Your fingers never leave the keyboard and your hand never touches the mouse! The time you save will amaze you.

Here’s one more very easy way to move text. First highlight it, using the above method. Then take hold of your mouse and left click on the highlighted text. Next simply DRAG the text to your new insertion point and let go of the arrow key! Your text will magically appear in that location.

The more your fingers stay on the keyboard the faster you can type those legal nurse consulting reports and create work product for your CLNC business.