It turns out it’s not as easy as you would think. I was going to find out how a date could be inserted into a Word document with a shortcut. I determined I was going to sort this out. The two of them are far enough apart as it is once my lack of attention to detail is thrown into the mix it only takes a little thing like today’s date being in place of the date the document was accessed to turn an academic directors face several shades darker red. Unfortunately in my current job the Harvard referencing system is the only one that is accepted. As he was looking through my work I’m not sure how many pitches his voice rose as he said “why is it showing today’s date?” Having trained as a lawyer I tend to put my references in the OSCOLA format.

And of course because it is also completely true. Of course the way the work should be done is his way of doing the work I will say that here and now just in case he ever manages to find my blog. It was during a particularly heated meeting with a superior when I was trying to argue my point of view over how my work should be done against his point of view over how it should be done that I discovered this idiosyncrasy of word. Of course, what many of you will also know is that if you insert the date this way the next time you open the document the date will change to whatever day that is instead. This was what set me off on my course of trying to save even more time on the computer. I did not know this, and I was overjoyed at how much time I would save in the future not having to type the date every time. Many of you will know that this inserts the date into a document. When I was trying to open my speech recognition program (the shortcut for which I have assigned as control, alt and D) I accidentally pressed shift, alt and D. Recently though I’ve been very busy I have had very few hours free in the day and oh so much to do with them. I have always been in favour of raising my efficiency anyway but I have not necessarily been dedicated to the cause. This week I decided that I was going to raise my efficiency when using the computer. How to assign a shortcut key combination to create a static date in Word 2010 rather than having to do it through the ribbon.

Word 2010 macro shortcut keys