Hi all

As many have noticed, I am co-authoring a book and right now I am writing all my stuff in Word 2007.

As you might have guessed, I have lots of sections, subsections, figures, tables and other numbered items in my text, and naturally, they are there because I need to reference them in my text.

In order to insert a cross reference from some text to a given numbered item, I found two options:

1. Go to the “References” tab and click on “Cross-reference” in the “Captions” section.
2. Go to the “Insert” tab and click on “Cross-reference” in the “Links” section.

Both will give me this window:

This is all very fine, but I need a quicker access point, since it appears that I most often need both clicks to get to the dialog box, since I am usually not on either the “Insert” or the “References” tab.

So I discovered the “Quick Access Toolbar” by chance. This happened when I accidentally right-clicked on the “Cross-reference” in stead of clicking on it. Here I could add the functionality to the “Quick Access Toolbar” and also choose to show the “Quick Access Toolbar”, as seen here:

The arrow points to the “Quick Access Toolbar” and the red square is around the “Cross-reference” functionality. So now I always only need one click, which made me happy… for a while

Because once I could do it with just one click, I started wondering about a keyboard shortcut for it. I couldn’t find one, and I searched and searched… and finally just after posting my question to a newsgroup, I found how to do it:

Go to “Word Options”, which is a button at the lower right when clicking on the Start button at the upper left of Word:

This will open up the Word Options. Go to “Customize” and click on “Customize…” as seen in the image below:

After this you get a screen where you can change short cuts, as seen here:

Choose “Insert Tab” and then “InsertCrossReference” and click in the “Press new shortcut key:” box. Now enter the shortcut you want (I entered Alt+Ctrl+Shift+C). Word will tell you if the shortcut you have chosen is all ready assigned to another function (Mine is “Unassigned” as you can see) and then you can click on “Assign” to complete the task.

So now, every time I need to insert a cross reference, I just pres Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C and the dialog box comes up.

All that is left now is to get the “Only Label and number” as the default value for the drop down that decides what to insert instead of “Entire Caption”, but a Word MVP wrote in a post I found that this was not possible. Bummer. Keeping my fingers crossed for Office 2010!

I hope this helps someone.

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eliasen