Press the keystroke again, and the bullets are gone. Now, whenever you press the keystroke you chose in step 4, it is the same as clicking on the Bullets tool. Click on Close to close the Customize dialog box.Click on Close to dismiss the Customize Keyboard dialog box.Alt+B is a good choice, since it is not in use on a default Word system. Press the keystroke you want to use to apply bullets.Click in the Press New Shortcut Key box.In the Commands list, choose FormatBulletDefault.In the Categories list, choose Formatting.Once the Customize Keyboard dialog box is displayed, follow these steps: In the Word Options dialog box, click Customize and then click the Customize button. If you are using Word 2007, click the Office button and then click Word Options.If you are using a version of Word prior to Word 2007, choose Tools | Customize | Keyboard button.(See Figure 1.) How you display the dialog box depends on the version of Word you are using.įigure 1. You do this by displaying the Customize Keyboard dialog box. If you want to have that same functionality from the keyboard, you must customize your keyboard.

While these may work for what you want done, they don't take the same approach to formatting as the Bullets tool on the toolbar. (On some systems it won't apply the style, even though the shortcut is still 'attached' to it.) To remove bullets, you could also use the Ctrl+Shift+N shortcut, which applies the Normal style. Unfortunately, there are many reports of this not working reliably. If you press Ctrl+Shift+L, Word is supposed to automatically apply the predefined List Bullet style to your paragraph. There are numerous other benefits to using styles, but most of those have been covered in other WordTips.Ĭlosely related to this approach are two built-in shortcuts provided by Word.

The first is to use styles and define keystrokes that apply your styles. If you are bound and determined to use the keyboard to apply (and remove) bullets, there are a couple of things you can look at. Unfortunately, there is no just-as-easy way to do the same thing using the keyboard. Word includes a handy-dandy tool on the toolbar that allows you to add bullets to a paragraph in a jiffy, and just as easily remove them.

Keyboard shortcut bullet point word