In a prior issue of the Cyberspace News, we told you how to establish shortcut keys for direct access to programs or files that you use often, without having to go to the Programs list and without cluttering up your desktop with lots of icons.  In this issue, we'll tell you how to establish shortcut keys to automatically execute desired actions in microsoft Word.  The instruc-tions are for Word 2000 but they're similar to those for other recent versions of Word, as well as for Excel and many other programs that have macro capability.

Suppose you usually want to insert today's date, right-justified, at the top of letters that you write.   To do that, you can go through the following steps:
(1) Put the cursor on the line where you want the date placed.
(2) There, you can type and justify the date manually or, if you want Word to enter the cor-rect date for you, you can go through the following additional steps:
   (a) On the taskbar at the top of the screen, click "Insert".
   (b) On the resulting menu, click "Date and Time".
   (c) In the window that appears, click the format that you want.
   (d) Click the "OK" button.
   (e) Next, on the Formatting toolbar (if you have set it to be visible), click the right-justify but-ton.
   (f) Now press the Enter key to advance to the next line, and finally
   (g) Click the left-justify button on the Formatting toolbar to cancel right-justification for the body of the document.

To avoid having to do that all the time, you can define a macro to do it, and then assign a shortcut key, as described below:

On the taskbar, click "Tools".  On the resulting menu, click "Macro" and on the next menu, click "Record new macro".  That will produce the window shown at the right

Make sure that the "Store macro in" text box specifies "All documents".  Type a name in the "Macro name" box if you don't want to accept the default.

Next, click the "Keyboard" button to produce the window shown at the left.  In the box labeled "Press new shortcut key", press the key combination you want to use in the future to insert a right-justified date.

Make sure that the "Save changes in" box indicates "Normal.dot" so that the shortcut key will apply to all new documents.

Click the "Assign" button and thereafter, the "Close" button.  That activates the macro re-cording function.

Go through the operations described earlier in this article, to insert and justify the date.  Then click "Tools", "Macro", and "Stop Recording".

That's all there is to it.  From then on, whenever you press the key combination you assigned, the current date (and time, if you chose a format that includes it) will be placed on the line where the cursor is located, and will be right justified, after which the cursor will advance to the left side of the next line.

This concludes the series on establishing your own shortcut keys.