How to Customize Microsoft Office 2013 Keyboard Shortcuts

icrosoft Office 2013 Consumer Preview is more than 10 days old and I have reviewed a lot of tricks and tips to learn its features on this blog. Today, I am going to cover one more tutorial which is based on Microsoft Office Keyboard Shortcuts customization. Keyboard shortcuts help computer users to increase their working speed on the computer and most of the available software on the internet support keyboard shortcuts. Microsoft Office 2013 Consumer Preview also supports a number ofkeyboard shortcuts which give a quick access to most of Office 2013 commands. The most beautiful aspect of Microsoft Office products is that they support keyboard shortcuts customization, so that Office users can access all its features with ease with the help of easy to remember keyboard shortcuts of their liking. In this post, I am going to explain how you can customize/change default keyboard shortcuts of Microsoft Office 2013. I have used MS Word as an example here but you can use the same steps to customize other Office 2013 applications as well.

Steps to change/customize Office 2013 Word Keyboard Shortcuts:
1. First of all, start Office 2013 Word and click on the File menu.


 2. Clicking on File will move you to a new screen where you need to click on the Options button to access the main settings panel of Microsoft Office Word 2013 (you can do the same for other Office 2013 applications like Excel, Access, PowerPoint, etc.).



 3. In Word Options area, click first on the Customize Ribbon option then on Keyboard shortcuts: Customize button. Please check the image below to get a clearer idea.


 4. In the Customize Keyboard window, you can select the Categories from the left-side panel and category commands from the right-side panel. In the image below, I have customized Home Tab Category and added a new shortcut Ctrl + H to make any selected text bold. You can press the desired key combination to change/customize any shortcut just like I pressed the Ctrl key with ‘H’ to create my shortcut to make text bold. Finally, click on the Assign button to save your newly created shortcut. You can remove the assigned keyboard shortcut for any specific command by using the Remove button which is available right after the Assign button. In case you think that you have don’t like the customized keyboard shortcuts and want to reset all the Office 2013 shortcuts to their default state then click on the Reset All button.


 You can check your newly assigned keyboard shortcut commands instantly to see if they are working properly. In step 4, I have assigned Ctrl + H shortcut to convert selected text in bold format to give you an example and as you can see in the image below, Office 2013 is now showing the Ctrl + H shortcut.