From the course: The Best of Word Tips Weekly

Draw lines quickly with the keyboard

From the course: The Best of Word Tips Weekly

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Draw lines quickly with the keyboard

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- [David] In this week's Word Tip, I'd like to show you a keyboard shortcut I use quite often for drawing straight lines that go across the entire page from the left margin to the right margin. Now, there are ways to draw lines using some of the functionality built into Word and to format those lines, but sometimes it's just quicker while you're already typing to throw in one of these lines, and there are many to choose from using several different keyboard shortcuts. So you can have a blank new document in front of you. Let's just start with a solid line. Hit the dash three times on your keyboard and press Enter. You can see what happens. It's a nice, straight line, not too thick. Let's go up here to the Paragraph group on the ribbon with the Home tab selected. Go to center. I'm going to change the font size here to something nice and big like 36 and type in my name. Now I'm going to press Enter. Go down to the next line. You can see how far I jumped down because of the font size, so I'll back up a couple of times, back up next to the S, and drop this back down. The font size is important when drawing lines for not just spacing, but the lines themselves. So I'm going to go back to 11. Now when I press Return, you can see I don't go quite as far. And if I want another line just like that, three dashes and Enter. Looks nice. I'm still centered. I can go to the left now, drop down a little bit, and start typing in additional content. But whenever I need a line, maybe a fancier line than what we're looking at, perhaps a thicker line would be better. Well, hold down your Shift key when you go to the dash, that's the underscore character, and press that three times. When you press Enter, you can see another line but thicker. Now, there's some fancier lines as well. Without having to select the line and format it, you can simply add them using keyboard shortcuts. Let's try the equal sign three times. Press Enter. You can see the double line. That's a popular one. How about the asterisk? That's Shift and the number eight. Three of those. Press Enter. And you can see the dotted or dashed line. And if we wanted to try the tilde, that's just left of the one at the top of your keyboard. Holding down the Shift key, three of those squiggly characters. Press Return. And you can see that's a totally different-looking line. Let's try one more, the pound sign, or as they call it these days, the hashtag. Three of those. It's always three. Press Enter. And you can see that's quite a fancy-looking line. Many different lines to choose from. Now, if we go in here and we bump up our font size to, say, 36 and do the same thing, I'm going to use the hashtag, three of them. You can see how big they are when I type them. When I press Enter, you can see it's the exact same line. The spacing is increased, but the line looks exactly the same. So it's good to know when you need lines stretching from the left margin to the right margin, there are many keyboard shortcuts for different styles of lines so you don't have to go into the ribbon, draw the line, format the line. It can be very time-consuming. If you know these keyboard shortcuts, you can save a lot of time and a lot of effort.

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