The ATA Chronicle - January/February 2017 - 34


RESOURCE REVIEW continued

Figure 4: Read Mode

Figure 3: The Document Inspector option

achieve the same result by double-clicking
the paintbrush icon).

Ctrl+Alt+V
This is also a helpful keyboard shortcut
to paste something. It opens a dialog box
that gives you access to paste content in
various formats, including unformatted
text, which sometimes can be very helpful
when pasting text from other sources,
such as webpages or PDF files.

Ctrl+Spacebar
And lastly, since we're talking about
unformatted text, one of the most
helpful shortcuts in Word has to be
Ctrl+Spacebar. This gets rid of all the
text formatting you selected.

Office Clipboard
Of course, for regular copy and paste
processes you already use Ctrl+C to
copy and Ctrl+V to paste, but one of the
problems with that is it uses the regular
clipboard and overwrites the last copied
item. One way of circumventing that
is to use the Office Clipboard, which
34

The ATA Chronicle | January/February 2017

simultaneously holds up to 24 different
items (you can open the Office Clipboard
by selecting the little launcher icon in
the lower-right corner of the Clipboard
group on the Home ribbon tab).

Spike
Another way to copy and past items
is by using the delightfully prehistoric
"Spike" feature, named after the equally
old-fashioned and painful-injurycausing paper holder that resembled
a long upward-facing nail onto which
papers were impaled. Unlike the
traditional copy and paste, Spike
doesn't use the clipboard, so it doesn't
overwrite any potentially valued content
you might have sitting there. To use
it, select some content (text, graphics,
etc.) within a Word document, press
Ctrl+F3, put the cursor in the document
where you want to move the content,
and press Ctrl+Shift+F3. This results
in the old instance being deleted and
transferred to the new location.
Once you do that, your spiked content
is not available anymore (which means

you can't place it elsewhere). If you want
to place it in more than one position,
you'll need to type "spike" in the desired
new location in the Word document and
press F3. That will position the Spike
content without "losing" it for further
use. (Yes, you're right, this last one
sounds like the ultra-nerdy shortcut-
feel free to forget it right away, unless,
however, you want to impress your
otherwise-so-much-more-tech-savvythan-you kids or other relatives.)
Oh, and to bring it back to where we
began, one of the benefits of using Spike
is that, unlike copy and paste, it keeps
all your Track Changes intact in the
transferred content.
Remember, if you have any ideas and/
or suggestions regarding helpful resources
or tools you would like to see featured here,
please e-mail me at the address below. 
Jost Zetzsche is chair of ATA's
Translation and Interpreting
Resources Committee. He
writes the "Geekspeak" column
for The ATA Chronicle. He is
also the co-author of Found
in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives
and Transforms the World, a robust source for
replenishing your arsenal of information
about how human translation and machine
translation each play an important part in
the broader world of translation. Contact:
jzetzsche@internationalwriters.com.
www.atanet.org
http://www.atanet.org
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