Microsoft Word Keyboard Shortcuts
Word shortcuts split into two very different worlds: the universal text-editing keys that work in almost every app on your computer (select, copy, bold), and Word-specific ones that only make sense once a document gets long enough to need navigation, styles, and review tools. A two-page memo barely needs shortcuts at all — you can mouse your way through it without losing much time. A forty-page report with headings, tracked changes from three reviewers, and a table of contents is a different story, and that's where keyboard fluency stops being a nice-to-have and starts being the difference between finishing on time and fighting the interface all afternoon. The shortcuts below are grouped around what actually slows people down in Word: moving through long documents without scrolling blindly, applying heading styles consistently instead of manually bolding and resizing text, managing tracked changes during review cycles, and the formatting basics everyone half-remembers but never fully commits to memory. Windows and Mac mostly mirror each other in Word more than they do in Excel, since Word's command set is simpler, but a handful of navigation and style shortcuts still diverge because of how each OS reserves certain function-key ranges.
Navigation
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jump to start of document | Ctrl+Home | Cmd+Home (or Fn+Ctrl+Left) | Moves the cursor to the very first character of the document, regardless of how far down you've scrolled or which page you're viewing. |
| Jump to end of document | Ctrl+End | Cmd+End (or Fn+Ctrl+Right) | Moves the cursor past the last character of the document — useful for quickly adding a new paragraph at the very bottom of a long report. |
| Move cursor by paragraph | Ctrl+Down / Ctrl+Up | Option+Down / Option+Up | Skips the cursor straight to the beginning of the next or previous paragraph in one press, avoiding a tedious crawl through several lines of wrapped text one arrow-tap at a time. |
| Open Go To dialog | Ctrl+G or F5 | Cmd+Option+G or Fn+F5 | Opens a dialog that jumps directly to a specific page, section, line, footnote, or bookmark by number, bypassing manual scrolling entirely. |
| Open Navigation Pane | Ctrl+F | Cmd+F | Opens the sidebar showing the document's heading outline (when styles are applied), letting you click any heading to jump straight there — the single best way to move around a long structured document. |
| Select current word | Ctrl+Shift+Right/Left (from word start) | Option+Shift+Right/Left | Grows the selection outward by a full word at a time in whichever direction you're pressing, a quicker route than plain Shift-arrow when you know you want whole words rather than individual characters. |
| Scroll up/down one screen | Page Up / Page Down | Page Up / Page Down | Scrolls the document view up or down by roughly one full screen's worth of content, moving the cursor along with the view, useful for a quick skim through a document at a pace faster than paragraph-by-paragraph navigation but coarser than Go To's precise jumps. |
Formatting
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Toggle bold | Ctrl+B | Cmd+B | Applies or removes bold formatting on the selected text or at the cursor for subsequent typing. |
| Toggle italic | Ctrl+I | Cmd+I | Applies or removes italic formatting, commonly used for titles of works, emphasis, or foreign-language terms. |
| Clear all direct formatting | Ctrl+Spacebar | Cmd+Spacebar | Strips manually applied character formatting (bold, italic, font color, size changes) back to whatever the underlying style defines, without removing the paragraph style itself. |
| Center align paragraph | Ctrl+E | Cmd+E | Centers the current paragraph horizontally — commonly used for document titles or pull quotes. |
| Justify paragraph | Ctrl+J | Cmd+J | Stretches text to align flush with both the left and right margins, adding extra space between words as needed — common in print-style layouts and newsletters. |
| Increase font size by 1pt | Ctrl+] | Cmd+] | Bumps the selected text's point size up by exactly one point, finer control than the font-size dropdown's preset jumps. |
| Toggle underline | Ctrl+U | Cmd+U | Applies or removes underline formatting on the selected text, the third of the three most basic character-formatting toggles alongside bold and italic. |
| Left align paragraph | Ctrl+L | Cmd+L | Aligns the current paragraph flush against the left margin, Word's default alignment for most body text in Western-language documents. |
| Decrease font size by 1pt | Ctrl+[ | Cmd+[ | Nudges the selected text's point size down by exactly one point with each press, the reverse of the increase-size shortcut, for the same kind of fine-tuned fitting work but shrinking instead of growing. |
Styles Headings
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apply Heading 1 style | Ctrl+Alt+1 | Cmd+Option+1 | Applies the document's Heading 1 paragraph style to the current paragraph, which is what populates the Navigation Pane and an auto-generated table of contents — far more reliable than manually bolding and enlarging text to look like a heading. |
| Apply Heading 2 style | Ctrl+Alt+2 | Cmd+Option+2 | Applies Heading 2, the sub-level beneath Heading 1, used for second-tier sections within a document's outline. |
| Apply Normal (body text) style | Ctrl+Shift+N | Cmd+Shift+N | Resets the current paragraph back to the Normal body-text style, useful immediately after pasting content that brought along unwanted styling from another document. |
| Open Apply Styles dialog | Ctrl+Shift+S | Cmd+Shift+Option+S (opens Styles pane) | Opens a small floating box where you can type a style name and press Enter to apply it — faster than digging through the Styles gallery on the ribbon when you know the exact style name you need. |
| Update table of contents | F9 (with TOC selected) | Fn+F9 | Refreshes an inserted table of contents to reflect current headings and page numbers after editing — does nothing if your cursor isn't inside the TOC field when you press it. |
| Apply Heading 3 style | Ctrl+Alt+3 | Cmd+Option+3 | Applies Heading 3, the third-level sub-heading beneath Heading 1 and Heading 2, used for finer subsections within an already-subdivided section of a document's outline. |
| Increase list indent level | Tab (at start of list item) | Tab | Pushes the current list item one level deeper into the outline, mirroring how heading levels nest but applied to bullets and numbers instead of headings. |
Review Tracking
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Toggle Track Changes | Ctrl+Shift+E | Cmd+Shift+E | Turns Track Changes on or off for the document, marking subsequent edits as insertions/deletions rather than applying them silently — essential before editing any document that's going back to someone else for review. |
| Accept the current tracked change | Ctrl+Alt+M (varies; often ribbon-only) / Alt+Shift+E commonly used for next change navigation | varies by version, often ribbon/Review tab only | Accepts the tracked change at the cursor's current location, folding the edit into the document permanently. |
| Insert a comment | Ctrl+Alt+M | Cmd+Option+A | Attaches a comment bubble to the selected text without altering the document body itself, the standard way to ask a question or flag an issue during review without editing the actual sentence. |
| Move to next tracked change | Alt+Shift+E (varies by version) | varies; often Review ribbon only | Jumps the cursor to the next tracked insertion, deletion, or formatting change in the document, letting you review a long document's edits sequentially without scrolling and hunting for colored markup. |
| Move to previous tracked change | Alt+Shift+E variant / Review ribbon | Review ribbon | Jumps the cursor backward to the previous tracked insertion, deletion, or formatting change, the reverse companion to moving forward through a document's tracked edits sequentially. |
| Reject the current tracked change | Ribbon-only in most versions | Ribbon-only in most versions | Throws out whichever tracked change the cursor is sitting on, reverting that edit and clearing its markup — the mirror opposite of accepting it into the document. |
Tables
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Insert a table (via Insert Table dialog) | Alt+N, T (ribbon access keys) | no default; use Insert menu | No single dedicated keystroke inserts a table in either OS by default; Windows users can chain ribbon access keys (Alt then N then T) to reach the dialog without the mouse, while Mac users need the Insert menu or ribbon click. |
| Move to next table cell | Tab | Tab | Advances the cursor to the next cell in a table, wrapping to the start of the next row at the end of a row — and automatically creates a new row if you Tab from the last cell of the table's final row. |
| Move to previous table cell | Shift+Tab | Shift+Tab | Moves backward to the previous cell, the reverse of Tab — note that pressing Tab inside a table cell never inserts an actual tab character, since Tab is reserved for cell navigation there. |
| Select the current table row | click left of row, or Shift+Down through cells | click left of row, or Shift+Down through cells | Word has no single keystroke that selects a whole table row independent of mouse position by default; the practical keyboard approach is placing the cursor in the first cell and extending the selection with Shift+Down or Shift+End across the row. |
| Insert literal tab character in cell | Ctrl+Tab | Ctrl+Tab | Inserts an actual tab character within a table cell's content without triggering cell navigation, necessary because plain Tab is reserved entirely for moving between cells while inside a table. |
| Delete current table row | Right-click row > Delete Rows, no default key | Same | Removes the entire row the cursor is currently in from the table, along with all its content, accessible through the right-click context menu since there's no bound default keyboard shortcut for this specific action. |
Frequently Asked Questions
Why doesn't Ctrl+Spacebar clear formatting on my Mac?
macOS frequently binds Cmd+Spacebar to Spotlight search system-wide, and that system-level shortcut intercepts the keystroke before Word ever receives it. Open System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Spotlight and either disable or reassign the Spotlight shortcut, or trigger Clear Formatting from the Home tab's eraser icon instead.
Is there a reliable shortcut to accept or reject tracked changes?
Not a fully consistent one — Word's accept/reject keyboard bindings have shifted across versions and differ between Windows and Mac builds, which is unusual for Word compared to its other shortcuts. Most reviewers who do this constantly assign their own custom shortcut through Word Options > Customize Ribbon > Keyboard Shortcuts, mapping AcceptChangesSelected and RejectChangesSelected to keys of their choosing.
Why does my table of contents show old page numbers after I edited the document?
Word treats a table of contents as a field that snapshots your heading text and page numbers at the moment it was generated — it has no way of knowing you edited a heading five minutes later unless you tell it to refresh. Right-click anywhere inside the TOC and choose Update Field, or click into it and hit F9 (Fn+F9 on many Mac keyboards). If headings were added, removed, or reworded rather than just shifted to a new page, pick 'Update entire table' in the dialog that pops up — the page-numbers-only option won't pick up the actual text changes.
Can I jump to a specific page without scrolling?
Yes — press Ctrl+G (Cmd+Option+G on Mac) or F5 to open Go To, choose Page from the list, type the page number, and press Enter. This works even in very long documents and is far faster than scrolling or using the vertical scrollbar's page-number tooltip.
Why did Tab create a new row instead of moving my cursor?
Inside a Word table, Tab is reserved entirely for cell navigation rather than inserting a tab character. Pressing Tab while in the last cell of the table's last row automatically appends a new row beneath it, which is by design — useful when entering data row by row, but surprising the first time it happens if you expected Tab to simply do nothing at the table's edge.