Been awhile since I posted this and I bet plenty of people still don’t know...

Favorite a sword and shield, equip them, enter favorites menu and while the sword is highlighted press left on the D pad... you’ll see a (1) appear next to the sword. Highlight the bow and press right on the D pad. You’ll see a (2) appear next to the bow. Now outside of any menu pressing Right of the D pad will switch you back and forth from bow to sword/shield.

This works perfectly until you equip a spell in the off-hand, in which case you need to manually re-equip your shield from the favorites menu as it is not technically hot keyed, yet it will still equip using this method, as long as the last time you had your sword out you also had the shield out.

Switching between ranged/melee without pausing the action makes combat much more enjoyable IMO. Enjoy.

I figured this out about a month ago, was really happy when I did. Makes the game much more fluent and fast paced. But as you said, most people probably don't know about this.
Good idea to post this.