Jumping to the End of a Word

Lori wonders if there is a keyboard shortcut to jump to the end of a word. She knows that Ctrl+Right Arrow jumps to the beginning of the next word, but she'd like to jump to the end of the next word, prior to any punctuation or spaces.

There is no built-in shortcut to do this. The only way it can be done is with a macro that could then be assigned to a shortcut key. You might think that you could simply record a macro that would move to the beginning of the next word (by pressing Ctrl+Right Arrow) and then back up one character (by pressing Left Arrow). This won't work, however, because the Ctrl+Right Arrow actually moves to the beginning of the next word or to the left of the next punctuation mark, whichever comes first. Thus, if the shortcut key moved to the left of a period (for example) at the end of a sentence, then moving one character to the left would put you within the word instead of at the end of the word.

So your macro needs to actually evaluate what is to the left of the insertion point after using the Ctrl+Right Arrow. The following does just that:

Sub MoveToEndOfWord1()
    Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdWord, Count:=1
    Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1

    If Selection.Text <> " " Then
        Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
    End If
End Sub

The only caveat for the macro is that you need to run it from within a word. If you are already at the end of a word, it does absolutely nothing. If you want a macro that will work from the end of a word, as well, then you need to modify it a bit:

Sub MoveToEndOfWord2()
    If Selection.Text = " " Then
        Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdWord, Count:=1
    End If

    Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdWord, Count:=1
    Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1

    If Selection.Text <> " " Then
        Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
    End If
End Sub

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8334) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Jumping to the End of a Word.