Keyboard Shortcuts for AI

[#1]

I deal with a tremedous amount of text files and we bold hundreds of names. In other software we use the ctrl+B shortcut but we have found we cannot do that in AI. Is there a quicker way than going to the character dropdown box and selecting bold?

[#2]

I deal with a tremedous amount of text files and we bold hundreds of names. In other software we use the ctrl+B shortcut but we have found we cannot do that in AI. Is there a quicker way than going to the character dropdown box and selecting bold?

[#3]

Character Styles might help you here.

Once you make a Bold character Style, you can apply it with a Click. You could also record an Action to apply the Style, then assign a shortcut key to the action to apply the Character Style using the keyboard

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/character-paragraph-styles.html