I recently graduated from Office 2003 to 2010, so I'm still feeling my way. Back in the 2003 version I used Word for my Outlook editor, most days. That doesn't seem to be an option any more, but then it doesn't seem to be necessary either. But there I could easily assign a keyboard shortcut to a style. That way, while writing an explanation, I could switch back and forth from my explanation to a code example (changing fonts, indentation etc); or in a long-running debate with an old friend, I could switch fonts between his words and mine, which is one part of the format we use to keep it straight. My usual code was <Ctrl-S> and then some letter: <Ctrl-S>,O for cOde, <Ctrl-S>,B for Bob and so on.

Outlook 2010 has the same feature; I can create a style, then add a keyboard shortcut for it. But it doesn't work! When I hit <Ctrl-S>,O, all that happens is that the highlighted text is replaced with an 'o'.

In fact, it's worse than that; I'm pretty sure that for the last week or so it's worked. Today it's back to not working again. I figure there must be a setting or something that controls it, but I haven't been able to find anything about it on the web. Anyone happen to know? I realize not many people use this feature; still, I live in hope.

If you're tempted to ask me about some of the style settings such as "Automatically update", "New documents based on this template" or "Save changes in", don't be afraid I'm going to take umbrage at being asked newbie-type questions; I'm a little lost and perfectly willing to start again from the beginning.