The video card on my laptop went kaput and it had to be shipped back to the manufacturer. The good news is that it died two weeks before the warranty expired, but the bad news is that it will take at least 3 weeks to get it repaired. In the meantime, a friend has loaned me a desktop from his office that isn’t currently being used. It is running XP Pro, SP2 and has Office XP loaded.
When I open Word, the first thing that catches my eye is that the menu bar has some very different settings. For instance, instead of Tools, it uses the term Utilities, but seems to cover the same items. However, when I was doing some editing, I couldn’t get many of standard keyboard shortcuts to work, i.e., Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, etc. I investigated the keyboard shortcut assignments and discovered that Alt-X was assigned to Cut, and Alt-C to copy. I added Ctrl-X as a new shortcut to cut text. It then occurred to me that perhaps the previous user had remapped the standard shortcuts, so I tried resetting the keyboard shortcuts to the default settings, and that wiped out the Ctrl-X I had just added and added back the Alt-X that I had deleted.
Is there some arcane version of Word that uses Alt instead of Ctrl for these shortcuts? Is there any method short of remapping the shortcuts to get the “standard” keyboard shortcuts back? I’ve internalized the standard shortcuts so well that my fingers just unconsciously reach for them. I’m not sure that I can remember which ones I use regularly, until I try to use one and some strange result appears on the screen.
