Phil Bernie Consulting

Word 2007 comes with the ability to add Quick Parts to your documents so you can quickly access frequently used blocks of text. As cool as this feature is, it would have lost a lot of its appeal if I had to use the mouse to access the Quick Parts from the ribbon menu which means I’d have to access them in 3 clicks, which really isn’t that Quick. What I wanted was the ability to insert it from a keyboard shortcut. At first this didn’t appear to be available but after a bit of digging I discovered it could be done (and without the use of a macro either). This blog post will take you through the process of creating a Quick Part and assigning a keyboard shortcut to it.

Creating a Quick Part

1. Quick Parts are essentially blocks of commonly used text. To create a Quick Part, simply highlight the text that you want to access via the Quick Part menu and select “Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery…” from the Insert ribbon
   
   
   
   
2. You should now see the “Create New Building Block” dialog. Fill in all the Relevant details and click “Ok”
   
   
   
3. You have now saved your new quick part to the Quick Part Gallery. To use your Quick Part, you can simply select it from the Quick Part Menu
   
   
   
   Or from the Building Blocks Organizer
   
   
   
   Using either of these methods will insert the Quick Part at the current cursor location in your document.
   

Assigning a Keyboard Shortcut to your Quick Part

Once you have created your Quick Part, it can be rather inconvenient to continually have to go to the Quick Part menu to insert it. What you can do instead is assign a keyboard shortcut.

1. Open up the “Word Options” dialog from the Office Button
   
   
2. In the Word Options dialog, click on Customize and then in the right hand panel, click the Customize button next to the Keyboards Shortcut prompt
   
   
   
3. In the Customize Keyboard dialog, in the left hand categories list box, scroll down and select “AutoText”, then in the right hand “AutoText” list box, scroll down to the name of the Quick Part you want to assign a keyboard shortcut to. Select the Quick Part and then select the “Press new shortcut key:” textbox and enter the shortcut key that you wish to assign to the Quick Part.
   
   Once you have done that, click Assign to go back to the Word Options dialog.
   
   

As you can see, Quick Parts can be an extremely useful when you’re repeatedly using specific blocks of text, however to really harness the power of Quick Parts, assign a keyboard shortcut to them so they’re even more readily available.