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Using the magic F4 key

Pressing the F4 key tells Word to repeat the last action you took, so its useful not only for repeating formatting but for repeating many other commands in Word. For example, if you type a paragraph and then press F4, Word types a copy of that paragraph. If you use the table creator to insert a four-column-by-three-row table and then click in another place in your document and press F4, Word will insert another 4-by-3 table. If you apply underlining to a word then click another word, it, too, will be underlined. There are several important things to keep in mind when using this wonderful key:

F4 is incredibly literal. It repeats the very last command no matter how trivial that command. So if you insert a 4-by-3 table, press Enter to move down a line and then press F4, Word wont insert another table; it will insert another carriage return that is, it will press the Enter key once more. If you select a heading and change the font to Algerian 48pt then select another heading and press F4, the headings font will remain the same but its point size will be change to 48pt (that is, if you applied the font selection before applying the font size). Its not always clear what constitutes the last command. For example, if you type two consecutive sentences and then press F4, Word will reproduce the whole two-sentence paragraph. It wont, as you might expect, simply repeat the last sentence or the last character you typed. Another example: if you select a word and click Bold and then Italic to format it, when you try F4 on another selection, all youll get is italic text, without the bold. To get around this, use Words font formatting dialog box to apply all the formatting in one go; Word will regard everything you do within the dialog box as a single action. F4 is repeatable. If you italicise a word, you can select another word and hit F4 to italicise it; then select a sentence and press F4 to italicise it; and so on, until you do something other than selecting an item. As you can tell from that last point, selecting an item is not regarded as a repeatable command for the purposes of the F4 key. There are many other unrepeatable commands, including some rather surprising ones. For example, if you select a word and press Backspace to delete it, you wont be able to repeat that command using F4. Toggles get toggled. Some commands in Word are essentially switches. For example, if you select a piece of normal text and press the Bold button, that text is bolded; if you immediately press the Bold button again while that bolded text is selected, its unbolded. Essentially, youve toggled the bold switch on and then off again. Thats what happens when you use F4: it will toggle the setting youve selected. Its important to remember this when you apply a group of formatting commands via a dialog box: any settings such as bold will get toggled.

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