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How do I create a style in Microsoft Word 2010 that is akin to a keyboard key to represent hotkeys or keystrokes?
Ideally it would be something similar to what's used here like this.
Nick T
Posted 2012-05-24T03:08:16.587
Reputation: 2 417
Creating a style to represent keyboard keys
Answers
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The simplest approach seems to be to define a character style with a border, a fill color, and a suitable font (Segoe UI Semibold looks “keyboard key like” to me). The border should be rather thin, like ¼pt, to avoid line spacing issues (though such issues could be fixed by setting fixed line height for paragraphs).
The main problem seems to be the lack of horizontal padding between the characters and the border. It would be awkward to solve this by adding space character into the content (using “ this ” instead of “this”). But I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done to this with Word styles.
Jukka K. Korpela
Posted 2012-05-24T03:08:16.587
Reputation: 4 475
is there a way to quickly call this style through a keyboard shortcut? It seems very tedious to have to manually update all key representations in a document with the created style each time. – prrao – 2012-05-25T01:14:43.663
@prrao, yes, you can assign a shortcut to the style in the style settings, see instructions at http://www.groovypost.com/howto/howto/assign-style-keyboard-shortcuts-word-2010-2007/ However, I noticed that when trying to assign Alt K to my style, it failed, apparently because Alt K is assigned to a built-in function (even though Word showed it as unassigned when I was setting it up). So I tried again and Ctrl Q worked OK. Your mileage may vary; built-in Alt K assignments depend on language version.
– Jukka K. Korpela – 2012-05-25T06:42:00.690