Sentences are a fundamental writing unit, so it’s hard to imagine why Word omitted them when setting up the standard keyboard shortcuts.
Let’s remedy that.
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Why not sentences?
We can move between or delete whole words with a keystroke. Jump up or down by lines, paragraphs, or even pages.
Why are sentences left out of the mix?
They’re just a little bit maybe slightly important to almost anything anyone would ever do in Word.
Fortunately, Microsoft included several all but hidden commands which we can assign to keyboard shortcuts ourselves.
Defining custom keyboard shortcuts
Word for Mac
In the menu, select Tools → Customize Keyboard…
The short video shows the steps to add a keyboard shortcut.
Selection All Commands in the top-left Categories. Then select one of the sentence commands (see below) in the top right Commands list. You can use the search bar to narrow the list.
Then enter your new keyboard shortcut in the Press new keyboard shortcut edit box near the middle before clicking the Assign button on the right.
Word for Windows
In Word for Windows, I previously showed how to do this in a detailed video on my YouTube channel.
The interface is clunkier than above (not bashing Windows; I’m a long time PC user), but the same basic steps apply. Select a command in the resulting dialog and assign a key combination.
Hidden sentence commands
As you're digging through the command list, the "hidden" Word commands to jump between sentences are: SentLeft moves to the beginning of the previous sentence while SentRight jumps to the next.
Similarly, SentLeftExtend and SentRightExtend select from the current position in the document to the beginning of the previous or next sentence.
With the latter commands, only part of the sentence is selected, but you can create a macro to select the whole sentence if you prefer (see the delete sentence article).
It’s a little odd why they didn’t connect these with any keyboard shortcuts since the commands are already there, but they’ll help us get started editing faster in Word.
Keyboard shortcuts
Now for the keyboard shortcuts.
In Word for Mac, I assign Option+Left Arrow (or Alt on Windows) and Option+Right Arrow for SentLeft and SentRight, respectively.
I assigned SentLeftExtend and SentRightExtend to Option+Shift+Home (or Alt+Shift on Windows) and Option+Shift+End. Not as consistent with the above movement shortcuts as I’d like, but I have the arrow key combinations assigned to other macros that I use more.
Some key combinations don’t work
Certain key combinations just won’t work. The specific ones vary between Mac and Windows, but you can also use the respective Customize Keyboard… dialog to find any key combinations that won’t register inside Word.
Keyboard shortcut patterns
I try to keep some consistency with my keyboard shortcuts. For sentence commands and macros, I usually use some key combination including the Option (or Alt on Windows) key.
It’s not a perfect system since there are only so many key combinations, but the pattern helps me remember and actually use them which is one of the bigger challenges when trying to write and edit faster.
Variations
Other articles show how to delete the current sentence (or the member version of the same article) or move sentences with a single keystroke.
In the blog content, I’ll also introduce how to add keyboard shortcuts within a macro allowing us to automate the process (for most cases) for many macros at the same time.
