Use the Keyboard to Move Items Up or Down in Microsoft Word

If you are a frequent user of Microsoft Word, you’ve already spent incredible amounts of time moving pieces of your document around, often by using copy and paste. If you simply need to move items up or down, there’s a keyboard shortcut that should save you a lot of time.

The keyboard shortcut is Shift+Alt + Up/Down, and it’s used to move items up or down.

To use this feature, you don’t even have to select the row or item that you want to move… just make sure your cursor is focused on the element or row you want to move:

Use the Shift+Alt+Up key, and the row where the cursor is will immediately move up:

This also works for other elements, such as paragraphs…

It also works with items in a bulleted list, and probably many other elements as well. This is one of those keyboard shortcuts that you can’t live without once you learn it.

The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. This article was written on 01/7/08 and tagged with: Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word

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Comments (7)

1. January 7, 2008 9:56 am
   Aaron Dick

   Very Cool! I also found that it works for me in PowerPoint to easily re-order my bullets.

2. January 7, 2008 6:05 pm
   Peter

   Absolutely, effin’ brilliant. Thanks for this one.

3. January 8, 2008 4:06 am
   Syahid A.

   Super tip! The ability to move rows with a shortcut is such a time saver.

4. January 8, 2008 8:53 pm
   wansaleh

   brilliant!!! thanks.

5. January 9, 2008 5:46 pm
   just-iced

   Isn’t that amazing?

6. January 31, 2008 1:28 pm
   stampsgal

   This is great! Thanks for much for sharing this!

7. August 2, 2008 11:53 pm
   Chris

   Oh. My. God.

   I can’t believe I’ve wasted all that time copying and pasting when I’ve discovered when I had made some sort of mistake that couldn’t be easily fixed in a table. Thanks a lot, Geek!