In order for a shortcut to work, you must select the text you want it to work on first. There are many ways to do this; here are a couple of ways:

• Click where you want to begin the selection, move your cursor to the other side of the text you are interested in, hold down your shift key and click again.
• Click and drag. Move your cursor to one side of the text you are interested in, hold down your left mouse button or mouse pad and move the cursor over the text you are interested in.

The selected text will have a blue background. Once you have selected the text you want to work on, then you apply the keyboard shortcut to perform the action you want. If you wanted to make the text bold, you would select the text and then hit the CRTL key and b at the same time on a Windows or Linux based computer or the COMMAND key and b at the same time on a MAC computer.