You Take The High Road and I’ll Take The Shortcut
http://www.wisecleaner.com
Where there’s a way, there’s a quick way
People like keyboard shortcuts for many different reasons. They may suffer from RSI and need to reduce the amount of mouse use, they might be used to working on old systems pre-mouse (haha, I know) or, like me, they just want to achieve the same end result in a much quicker way.
I’d like to share my top 5 favourite keyboard shortcuts, and, in the style of reality tv based voting type shows, in no particular order:
(1) ALT and TAB
These days we have so many applications open at one time and trying to find the one we want quickly can be frustrating. You can use the mouse to hover over the taskbar icons, you can minimise applications until you see the one you want. I use ALT and TAB together, to bring up a thumbnail cycle in the centre of the screen that shows all my open applications and all I have to do is stop on the one I want. You can also use the WINDOWS key and TAB – that just makes it more swish swish (I’m not great at technical descriptions)
(2) WINDOWS and D
This relates to (1) when you have many applciations open. Say we need to get back to the desktop to get a file or shortcut that is stored there. You could minimise each application window one by one, you could use the show desktop icon (although no one really knows where that is since they got Windows 7) or you can simply press WINDOWS key and D to show your desktop.
(3) SHIFT and F3
When you are in any Microsoft Office application and you’ve just spent time typing a lot of text without realising you still had the caps lock on (or vice versa) do you delete it and start again? No, highlight it all and use SHIFT and F3 to cylce through the character case until you see it in the format you need. This is also good for converting imported text that is in the wrong case as well.
(4) CTRL and F
Everyone uses Google to search for stuff. You find the result you want in the summary list and then click on through to the page, however, you can’t see anything relating to what you want and end up having to scroll, read, scroll, read. You shouldn’t! You need to use CTRL and F, enter the search term you used in the google search to quickly jump to the area you need in the page. CTRL and F also works in many applications to find a particular word(s) with ease.
(5) WINDOWS key and L
“Everytime you leave your seat, press CTRL, ALT and DELETE” Very good security practise but doing it that way involves, in my opinion, using too many hands and mouse clicks. I use just WINDOWS key and L and I’m at the coffee machine in no time.
…….and just for fun if people don’t do (5) then you can use CTRL and ALT GR and the cursor arrow keys to rotate their screen (ensure you know how to get it back to normal). It might encourage them to lock their screen the next time they leave their seat if they find they can’t get it back to normal. Some people will never learn – I know of one person who simply physically turned his monitor upside down to resolve the issue……..
So, you take the high road and I’ll take the shortcut and I’ll be.
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