Shortcut For Strikethrough Text Mac

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When working with Word, you’ve probably seen two different kinds of text with lines through it (something we call “strikethrough”). Red text with a red line through it happens when you delete text while the collaborative Track Changes feature is on. Black text with a black line through it just has special character formatting applied. Here’s how both work.

Why Would You Want to Strike Through Text, Anyway?

The long way to strikethrough text starts in the Home tab of the Ribbon. Click the Font Settings button in the lower-right corner of the Font section (or press Ctrl + 1 ): That opens a dialog box, and you can select Strikethrough from there.

It’s a good question. Why cross out words when you can just delete them? When you’re tracking changes in Word so that you can collaborate with other people, keeping that deleted text visible, but struck through, lets them know what has changed. They can even review those change and accept or deny them. We’ve got a full guide on keeping track of changes made to a Word document, so we’re not going to cover all that in this article. It’s a good read, though, if you’re collaborating on a document.

RELATED:Keeping Track of Changes Made to a Document

Instead, we’re going to focus on how to apply strikethrough character formatting and why you might want to.

So, why bother? Well, you might be collaborating with someone and not want to use the Track Changes feature. Maybe they don’t use Word, and you’re sending it to them to view in Google Docs, or as a PDF they can print out. Either way, you can strike through text as a suggestion that it be deleted, but leave it in place for them to see. This is particularly useful in a situation where, for example, you’re tutoring a student in a subject like a foreign language. It’s much easier for the student to learn if they can go back and see the mistakes along with the corrections.

Shortcut

Some writers also use strikethrough text (and occasionally often overuse it) to show a change of thinking in a document. Or maybe you just want to be annoying funny.

Whatever the reason, we’re here to show you how to do it.

How to Apply Strikethrough Formatting to Text

Applying strikethrough formatting is pretty easy. Start by selecting the text you want to strike through. You can do this by clicking and dragging over the text (or just double-clicking a word), but when you do this, Word likes to select the space after the text, as well. If you don’t want that to happen, click to place your insertion point at the beginning of the text, and then Shift-click at the end of the text for a more precise selection.

If you want to get fancy and select multiple words spread out through the document at the same time, you can do that, too. Select the first bit of text the regular way, and then hold down the Ctrl key while selecting additional text in different places. We suggest only doing this a paragraph at a time because it’s frustrating when you accidentally let go of the Ctrl key and have to start over.

When you’ve got your text selected, look on the “Home” tab of Word’s Ribbon. In the “Font” group, click the “Strikethrough” button (it’s the three letters with a line drawn through them).

Now, any text you had selected should be struck through.

You can also apply strikethrough formatting using the Font window. Select your text, and then press Ctrl+D to open that window up. Here, you can select not only the regular “Strikethrough” option but a “Double Strikethrough” option if you want to go that way, instead. Make your selection, and then click the “OK” button.

Make Things Easier By Creating a Keyboard Shortcut

Word has loads of keyboard shortcuts, including a bunch for applying formatting. Unfortunately, there’s no built-in shortcut for applying strikethrough formatting. If it’s something you do a lot, though, you can create your own key combo.

RELATED:All of the Best Microsoft Word Keyboard Shortcuts

Start by opening that Font window back up. Now, press Ctrl+Alt+Plus (you might have to use the Plus key on your number pad). Your cursor should very briefly turn into a clover shape. After that happens, click the “Strikethrough” option and a Customize Keyboard window should open.

Here, you can assign your preferred keyboard combo by clicking once in the “Press New Shortcut Key” box and then pressing the keys you want to use. If the combination you choose already has a shortcut function, Word will let you know that it’s currently assigned to something else. You can, of course, still use it even if it’s assigned to something else, but it’s better to try to find a combination that doesn’t have any current functions. We find Ctrl+Alt+- (minus) is pretty easy to remember and doesn’t have any other use in Word.

Press the “Assign” button, and then go back to your Word doc and try it out.

Now you have your customized strikethrough shortcut!

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MS Word provides a number of shortcut key combinations to make your office work faster. If you need to use MS Word a lot, it is highly recommended that you learn a few useful shortcut keys —it will help you work swiftly. You can press Ctrl+B to make text bold, Ctrl+U to make the text underlined. These shortcuts work in all the parts of Microsoft Office, like MS Excel, MS Outlook, MS PowerPoint etc.

However, by default, MS Word does not provide shortcut for strikethrough command. Even though strikethrough is an often used command, it is surprising that Microsoft has not created a shortcut key for strikethrough. But the good thing is that we can customize MS Word to create such a shortcut key combination. Today I will teach you how to set a quick way to make the text strikethrough.

Sometimes in a document, you don’t need certain text but you don’t want to delete it. In such cases, you can strikethrough the text. The piece of text will remain in the document for later reference (and even for later inclusion) —but at the same time, strikethrough will tell the reader that the text is no longer relevant. It looks something like this: Strikethrough text

How to Set Strikethrough Shortcut in MS Word

You will need to do the following process just once and after that, you will be able to strike out text by pressing the chosen key combination.

Open any MS Word document. You can open even a blank document as well.

Press Ctrl+D to bring up the Font dialog box. This box shows you the font formatting options.

Now press Ctrl+Alt and while holding both these keys down, press plus key on your Numeric Pad (Numpad).

For

Your cursor will change to a clove shaped one. Release the Ctrl+Alt keys and click on the Strikethrough option in the Font dialog box (shown with the red circle in the above image).

Customize Keyboard dialog box will open. Put your cursor in the Press new shortcut key box and press the shortcut key combination that you would like to set for strikethrough option. I have set it to Ctrl+Shift+S … You can also set it like that. Put the cursor in Press new shortcut key box and press Ctrl+Shift+S.

Customize Keyboard dialog box in MS Word for setting shortcut for strikethrough.

Shortcut For Strikethrough Text Mac

MS Word will automatically capture the keys you will press. You can use any combination of Shift, Alt, Ctrl and a letter key. If you will press a key combination that has already been assigned to some other command, MS Word will show you this information. It is better not to overwrite any existing shortcut. Ctrl+Shift+ is a good combination.

Click on Assign button to set the shortcut for strikethrough.

Windows Shortcut For Strikethrough Text

That’s it!

Shortcut For Strikethrough Text

Now to test whether it is working or not, type anything in the MS Word document. Select the text and press Ctrl+Shift+S (or the other combination that you’ve chosen). The selected text will immediately be strikethrough.

Keyboard Shortcut For Strikethrough

I hope you found this little tip on setting shortcut for strikethrough in MS Word useful. Should you have any question on this topic, please feel free to ask me through the comments section on this page. I will try my best to be of help to you. Thank you for using TechWelkin!