In my previous posts on Enabling the “Mark Comment Done” & “Quick Switching between Review Markup Styles” I made reference to repetitive stress injury inducing activities and how to avoid them, but the biggest single improvement I made to my editing process for the book was creating a hotkey for Approving Comments.

I have long been a fan of Office Application allowing me to customize my toolbar and tabs, but until recently I did not realize what I was missing with creating hotkeys.  The operation is simple and intuitive and makes repetitive functions significantly easier to live with.

Simply right-click in the ribbon and select “Customize the Ribbon”

This will open the Word Options window where you will select the “Keyboard shortcuts:” customize button.

Once open you will select the tab that contains the feature you are looking to create a hotkey for.  In this case I selected the Review Tab and chose the AcceptChangesOrAdvance option.

To avoid the aforementioned repetitive stress injury inducing activity I chose to employ multiple key combinations so that I could switch hands as I went so that I didn’t over use one combination and cause myself to be a claw-handed, arthritis riddled, angry author.  The nice thing about the Customize Keyboard window is that it lets you know when key combination is already in use so that you can decide whether or not you want to override the existing hotkey or add an additional hotkey.

Once I assigned the changes I was able to go back to Word and use the hotkey right away.  This saved me a decent chunk of time as it allowed me to keep both hands on the keyboard and not to have to use the touch screen or the mouse.