PM Tech Corner: Power Shortcuts in Writing for Project Managers

Welcome to the Technical Corner for PMI Portland Chapter. We are very excited for this upcoming 2015/2016 Year and look forward to continuing providing excellent pointers, tips and tricks for you as you manage or work on projects or in project organizations.

In this month’s article, I will be highlighting key shortcuts for working in any email, word processor or text interface.

For those who haven’t met me before, my name is Tim Runcie and I manage a Project, Program and Portfolio management methodology and technology training and consulting company called Advisicon. Our whole focus is to help organizations optimize and leverage both PPM methodologies and great tools to automate and streamline productivity.

In my day job, I get to review and look at all types of different tools and approaches to solve business problems. My passion is to help our community of practice, leverage low hanging fruit that will readily empower them to go further, farther and faster by the blend of technology and best practice methodologies, so if you or your organization has a question, feel free to reach out to me directly, chances are you aren’t the first and the answer is there.

Now, let’s review some key technical tips to help speed up your use of the daily tools you use.

If you type, you will use this:

One of the key tasks of any project manager is writing and typing. I’m going to break down some key steps that should save you time in all your writing, editing, emailing, or whenever you are using a keyboard, touchpad or mouse.

Let’s look at how text is stored. The graphic below represents the paragraph symbol, and it can be seen by turning on the Show/Hide paragraph symbol on the Home tab in Microsoft Word.

Key Shortcuts and their uses:

1. Fastest way to select an entire paragraph: When you triple-click anywhere in the paragraph, it highlights the paragraph (even the subject line or all of the names in the To line in your email). This way you don’t need to drag and highlight, which can cause you to accidentally move or miss parts of the text.
2. Another fast way to highlight an entire paragraph:
   1. Double-click on the left side opposite the desired paragraph. Make sure you are far enough to the left so that the cursor has changed to an arrow.
      
3. Fast way to select an entire line: This is a continuation of option 2. Using the Selection Bar, click once on the left side opposite the desired line. Make sure you are far enough to the left so that the cursor has changed to an arrow, and it will select the entire row. This is great for working in tables or for highlighting a bulleted line.
4. Fast way to select a single word: Double-click anywhere on a word with your mouse to highlight a word.
   1. This can be done in Excel to select within a cell to select key words or references.
   2. In the body of an email or even in most mobile devices or tablets, you can double tap to select a word.
5. Fast way to select an entire sentence: When you hold the Control key down and click anywhere in a sentence, you will highlight that entire sentence.
6. Quick way to highlight an entire document: Triple-click on the left side. Make sure you are far enough to the left so that the cursor has changed to an arrow.
7. Another quick way to highlight an entire document: Hold down the Control key and single-click on the left side of any text.

Speed Shortcuts with Style:

Let’s take a look at another very powerful shortcut used when using Microsoft Word: styles. In general, using styles is the fastest way to maintain formatting standards, indentation and all elements used in documents in a single click. Let’s breakdown styles in some quick and simple approaches.

Where are they and how do we use them?

Styles allow you to maintain standards throughout an entire document. By changing the style, text or paragraphs are automatically formatted throughout the entire document.

You can even apply keyboard shortcuts to apply styles so you aren’t even selecting or formatting text, just type and press your keyboard shortcut and the paragraph or text will immediately apply a standard spacing, formatting or alignment.

Styles are easily accessed from the Ribbon or even with hot keys.

Styles can be found right on the HOME tab on the ribbon.

There are two types of styles:

1. Paragraph styles
2. Text styles

Paragraph styles allows you to simply click anywhere in the paragraph, apply the style, and the entire paragraph reformats itself. Text styles allow you to format text without the paragraph style overwriting the formatting. Think of it as a protected section of text that you would use to emphasize key points, without wanting the rest of the paragraph style to overwrite it.

Here is the key value: both the paragraph style and text style can be formatted once, and all text within a document with the same style name can automatically reformat itself to the changes. This is the fastest way to maintain standards of size, indentation, formatting and all elements associated to paragraph look and feel. When reviewing styles, you can just hover your cursor over a style and Microsoft Word will automatically show you what it will look like before applying it.

You can quickly edit your own styles and save them for sharing by clicking the drop down in the right corner of the style guide on the Home tab.

I hope these tools and shortcuts allow you to save time in your day-to-day work. Try them out! Our goal for our Tech Corner is to supercharge your ability to leverage technology in your Project, Program and Portfolio work.

Warmest wishes for your work and do reach out to me at Tim.Runcie@Advisicon,com for questions or other techniques/tools and blended methodology approaches. Happy PM’ing!

About the Author

	Tim Runcie is the president of Advisicon (a Gold PPM Company), a 20+ year project, program and portfolio expert and member of the Microsoft Advisory council.  Tim is also the author of over 36 books on technology and project management and a 12+ year nominated and awarded MVP at Microsoft. Tim and Advisicon offer webinars, classes and customized training for all your project management needs.