Mar 13, 2015

The Spike in Microsoft Word is a feature that has been around for years. I can remember it being featured in courses I taught back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Recently, I discovered that it is still in the application! Its purpose is to enable the user to collect together pieces of content from the same or different Word documents and then paste them all in together. It pastes each bit in the order that they were collected. This can be useful if you are rearranging a documents' content or want to source the content for a document from more than one place efficiently. The Spike is part of the feature called AutoText which was incorporated into the new feature of Word 2007 called Building Blocks. You don’t need to know anything about AutoText or Building Blocks to use The Spike though. To collate the content on The Spike:

1. Select the first bit of content to add.
2. Press Ctrl + F3 on the keyboard.
3. Select the next bit of content.
4. Press Ctrl + F3.
5. Repeat this process until all the content has been collated on the Spike.

To insert the content stored on the Spike there are two methods:

1. Type spike and press F3 or
2. Press Ctrl + Shift + F3

For more information, have a look at New Horizons' Microsoft Word training courses.