Ever found yourself wanting to modify a keyboard shortcut in Word 2007 or other Microsoft Office products? I just experienced extreme frustration due to mistakes in the online help, and I want to offer the solution to others.

You may find old references telling you to use the Tools menu, but there IS no tools menu in Word/Office 2007. Instead, hit the "Office button" (the colored one in the top left corner), then notice the "Word Options" button at the bottom right, under the list of "recent documents".  Then choose "Customize" on list of options on the left, then at the bottom of the screen shown, notice the "keyboard shortcuts" "customize" button. Phew.

From there, you can use explanations found even in old references.  In my case, I went to the "press new shortcut key" field and entered the keystroke for which I wanted to add a new combination (in my case, ctrl-y, to redo and undo) and it reported underneath the box for "current keys" that this was assigned to "EditRedoorRepeat".

Now if I wanted to assign a new key to that, I had to find it in the list of options under "specify a command" for "categories" and "commands". Rather than hunt all over, I chose "all commands" from near the bottom of the categories list, then found EditRedoorRepeat in the alpha-ordered list of commands. I then entered my preferred new (additional) keystroke for a redo (ctrl-shift-z). It showed me that it was already assigned to something, but I didn't care about that. I clicked "assign", and it added it to the list of keystrokes for that EditRedoorRepeat command.

Then I clicked "close" and "ok", and wrote this blog entry Hope it helps someone.

Here's yet another useful keyboard tip repository: Windows keyboard shortcut of the day

And today they happened to share something I didn't know about getting Windows (XP in the tip, and Vista in a comment I just left) to help you see underlined letters for doing shortcuts.

Despite the site's name, the tips aren't generally updated daily (last one was in April), but that's ok by me. Heck, you'll want to  troll the archives for past goodness. Plenty of gold in "them thar hills". :-)

I don't too often just point to other blog entries, but this one is just too good to let slip by:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-be-more-productive-with-firefox-quick-searches/ 

If you ever find yourself frequently searching a site (like Amazon, or some knowledge base of a product you use or support, or a mailing list archive), this is a great way to do it in a single keyword.

 As for the site (makeuseof.com), that's itself a site devoted to sharing lots of tips. I've written about it elsewhere:

http://carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/2007/11/24/check_out_makeuseof