How to save a document in Word without a mouse

Probably every user of a personal computer has at least once encountered a situation when the small arrow with which we press buttons and drag windows suddenly freezes on the screen and refuses to follow any mouse movements. For some people, reconnecting the plug or rebooting helped. But some found themselves faced with the need to purchase a new device. Not only the mouse, but also the laptop’s touchpad can fail.

Ways to save a document in Word without a mouse

If a device malfunction occurs during normal Internet surfing or watching a movie, no big disaster happens. But what to do when you typed text in a test editor? When were entire pages written? Here another input/output device comes to the aid of the user - the keyboard. In Windows, special combinations are provided for such emergency situations, which are called hot keys.

Key combination

There are many keyboard shortcuts. Some bring up the user selection screen, allow you to open the task manager, others help you create copies and move selected content from document to document or from one folder to another. We are interested in the sequence of clicks that saves the text.

First of all, it is worth saying that combinations are not composed arbitrarily, but using special service keys on the keyboard, which are also called modifiers: Shift, Alt and Ctrl. Shift is most often used in combination with a mouse click, or to differentiate and clarify actions. Alt – to launch general actions related to operating system processes, closing applications or minimizing windows. To work with the contents of the window, use Ctrl.

Keyboard shortcuts are universal and if they perform a saving function, then they work in most applications, including text editors. The popular Word, Excel and Power Point from Microsoft Office are no exception. This “globalization” is very convenient and is dictated by the commonality of information processing actions inherent in any program. This means that using the combination Ctrl + S, you can save the result of your work: text, picture, spreadsheet content, presentation.

The Ctrl + S combination has some disadvantages, which, on the other hand, is its advantage. The inability to save a file to a specific location on your hard drive can sometimes be a bit of an inconvenience. Information is saved where the file was created at the beginning of work. The benefit is that the function is simple and always works flawlessly, guaranteeing one hundred percent results.

Correctly, the combination of Ctrl and S, like most all other combinations, is entered like this: first press the first key, hold it down and then press the second. You can also press simultaneously.

Via control panel

The previous method can be called an emergency or backup method. But the best way to save the results of your work is to configure the application itself to automatically save.Word has had this feature since the very first versions. And in popular current ones, which include different releases from 2007 to 2018, the document is saved by default with a short interval. Usually it's 10 minutes.

You can set the saving time period by opening the “file” menu, selecting the “options” section and then going to the “save” tab. The “saving every” column ends with a small field in which you need to enter the required number of minutes. You can approach the question radically and enter the number 1.

Attention! The process does not put any noticeable load on the computer and disk subsystem, and therefore minute-by-minute saves have a right to exist. With this value, even a sudden power outage will lead to minimal loss of information.

other methods

There are simply no more advanced and simpler methods than those described above. We can only add that there are extended analogues of the same saving options, but using third-party software.

For example, one of the most famous and free programs for creating copies of files, Cobian Backup, allows you to save a file at any time frequency, but in addition it can work with files over the network, saving entire groups in different places of the files. The advantage of such applications is that all conservation work can be centralized and the network can be used to store a copy.

For example, when several people work on different computers, all these functions come to the fore and greatly facilitate the organization of work activities.

The article talked about only one keyboard shortcut. But it will be useful for any user to simply search for information on all the others.There are equally useful combinations. It would also be a good idea to get acquainted with programs for creating backups. And the best way to insure against information loss is by setting up automatic saving directly in the working application.