I hate mice!

October 14, 2010 4:26 PM

I can't find a couple Word for Mac keyboard shortcuts, and my google skills haven't helped me find the answer. Can you?

I'm not a fan of using a mouse, and I've been trying to find the Word for Mac keyboard equivalent of the following:

- right-click: on Windows machines/keyboards there’s a menu button down by cmd/alt/ctrl that invokes the right click context menu, but I don’t know the Mac equivalent keystroke.
- alt keys to invoke the menus: On Word for Windows Alt-F opens the File menu, Alt-E opens Edit, etc, but that doesn’t work on a Mac. What does?

I know most of the rest of the keyboard shortcuts or at the very least where to find lists of them, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out those two.

posted by pdb to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Right-click: Turn on MouseKeys in the Universal Access system preferences pane, then you can use the numeric keypad and Control-Num-5. Note that unlike on Windows, it always context-clicks at the mouse position, so you won't actually get the context menu for what you've selected using the keyboard, you'll get it for wherever your mouse pointer happens to be. Not really very useful. Fortunately, there is rarely anything on the context menu that you can't get to another way.

Menu keys: Control-F2 by default activates the menu bar, but you can change this in the Keyboard
posted by kindall at 4:41 PM on October 14, 2010

.. the Keyboard system preference panel.
posted by kindall at 5:12 PM on October 14, 2010

Works like a charm. Thanks!
posted by pdb at 8:45 PM on October 14, 2010

If you're on a laptop or have one of those new external trackpads you can also do a two finger touch and click to invoke the contextual menus. If you're at all like me and use remote PCs with you mac (through RDC for example) this is amazingly helpful. Basically you develop a habit that works on either platform. Mostly I'm just fond of one handed browsing.
posted by cjorgensen at 8:45 AM on October 15, 2010

To add to cjorgensen's post, on the latest Macbook Pros, 2-finger touch invokes the contextual menu for wherever you are.
posted by dolface at 3:16 PM on October 15, 2010