I am working on a specific project that entails highlighting in yellow a specific number in the middle of a document.

My wrist is getting quite tired of going to the mouse (I use mostly keyboard strokes for save, new, copy, paste, etc.) to simply highlight four numbers on each document.

Is there any way I can make a keystroke that will automatically highlight the text I select?

Thanks,
June

p.s. I've just spent half an hour looking at MSN Word discussions! Time to take a shortcut and ask here.

To Add: I'm using Office 2007

I am not sure if this will help you, but you can highlight multiple areas of text (within a document) that are not next to each other by selecting the first piece of text, then hold down the CTRL key and select any other pieces of text as required. Then you can do whatever you want to with them - apply the highlight, or bold, or italics, or delete, or whatever. I use this one a lot. Even if it doesn't help you with this problem, it's a good shortcut to remember for other times.

The only other thing I can think of is to create a macro for it.

I did a google search and came up with the following. I don't know if this will work but you could try it.

http://www.techtalkz.com/microsoft-office/66029-there-keyboard-shortcut-highlighting.html

RE: Is there a keyboard shortcut for highlighting?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is no predefined shortcut for Highlight but you can easily assign one:
Select Tools > Customize and click the Keyboard button.
Below Categories, select "All Commands".
Below Commands, select "Highlight".
Enter the desired shortcut.
In order to make the shortcut available to all documents, select Normal.dot
in the "Save changes in" list.
Click Assign.
Click Close.

To save the change to Normal.dot, press and hold the Shift key while you
select File > Save All. If a dialog box opens, asking whether to save changes
to Normal.dot, click Yes.

The shortcut will apply the highlight color that is currently selected in
the Highlight icon in the Formatting toolbar.

Thanks for the clues MotherGoose. I went from Office 2003 to Office 2007. It is a horse of a whole 'nother color. First I had to discover what to use now instead of Tools, since they don't use that term anymore. In fact, I have a whole printed binder with what the commands in Word and Excel were and what the comparable commands are now .

For example, I went to the "File" drop down list (in the upper left hand corner of the screen). Then I went to Word Options, then to customize, then to keyboard -- customize, then another drop down list of all the tabs (heh.. told ya the thing is different!), then selected the home tab (where the highlighting is now located), then selected the highlighting option, then finally was able to assign a keystroke. It automatically saves when I assign the keystroke.

But hey, that only took me 5 minutes instead of the looking and looking on the MSN Office Word website! So thanks for the lead -- it will save me much time as well as an aching wrist.

I knew you guys would come through!

To Add: I thought since we are on the subject I'd give everyone a heads up. Office 2007 is not necessarily compatible with previous versions. The files are not saved as .doc, or .xls. They are now saved as .docx or .xlsx. I found the problem to be that when I send any documents via email, the person to whom I am sending them cannot open the file if they have a previous version of Office. There is a file that can be downloaded to allow one to read the newer version. Yet, there can still be some loss of data.

However, to make it simple and not require the downloading of something from MSN by everyone I may send documents or spreadsheets to, I have found an option in Word and Excel that will force all documents to be saved in the old .doc or .xls format. I would expect the same option is available in Power Point and Access.

It does take some getting used to. Now that I have learned more about it, I do believe I like it better than the old version. But, it was like taking a horse to water and trying to make him drink -- I really did not care to try to learn what amounts to a whole new program.