Undoing and redoing actions

Do you ever edit your document, make a change, and then almost immediately wish you hadn't? You can undo and redo up to 100 changes in Word 2010. And you can repeat any action you take as many times as you wish. Let's focus for a moment on the Quick Access toolbar. There are three buttons here. The first button is Save, but then we have an Undo button. And the second button is usually a Repeat button. It shows a cycle. But if we recently used Undo, it will turn into a Redo button.

That reverses the Undo. So it's an Undo-Undo button. We are going to Select and Delete a paragraph in our document. And we are going to do that again. We are going to Select another paragraph and Delete it. And then we are going to Delete a third paragraph of text. But maybe we wish we hadn't deleted paragraph number 4. We can easily undo this one deletion. The shortcut key for Undo is Ctrl+Z. But we can also click the Undo button here on the Quick Access toolbar.

Either of those will undo the last action we did. To undo more than one action, we could hold Ctrl and hit Z twice more to restore all of the actions that we have taken. Let's go ahead and cut again three times, and remove paragraphs 2, 3, and 4. Now, once we click Undo, notice that our Repeat button changes to Redo. In other words, take it away again. Let's Undo, Undo, Undo, and we can then Redo, Redo, Redo.

So you can spend all day doing this, going back and forth between cutting text and replacing text. However, we don't have to click Undo three times. There is actually a History that's kept. Now, the History is a little cryptic. If you didn't know what you just did, it would be hard to tell what it is. But this says I want to Undo a Clear, which is a Delete, and I want to actually Undo 3 of them. So I can move all the way down here and Replace all 3 of those items at one time. Notice that because I did it at once, there's only one Redo available to me, which is to get rid of 1, 2, 3.

So here is my bulk process, this History button on my Undo button. Now let's Select and Bold some text. To repeat this formatting action, notice I don't have a Redo button, because I haven't undone anything recently, I have a Repeat button, which would allow me to repeat the Bold. So I could select some other words, and I could click Repeat. That's actually a long way to go to do that, because I am bypassing the Bold button on the way. This is a good time to know the shortcut key for Repeat or Redo, which is Ctrl+Y. So if I wanted to repeat that formatting change on other text, I can just select text, hold Ctrl, and hit Y, or I can hit the Repeat button.

You can repeat an action as many times as you wish. So I use Undo when I have taken an action and want to change my mind about it, such as deleting this text. I use Redo to undo the Undo. And I use Repeat when I have taken an action and then want to take that action again on another selection of text. Some actions cannot be undone. For example, you can't undo printing a document.

You can't undo saving a document. And if there is no action to undo, the Undo button will be grayed out, as it appears right now. The Undo History is totally reset whenever I save my document. So if I save my document right now, there's not only nothing to undo, there will be nothing left to redo. And anytime I close Microsoft Word or save a document, these Histories are totally deleted. Remember then that any time you work in Word, you can always undo an action that you have taken, as long as you haven't saved since you took that action.