Shortcuts

They say there are no shortcuts in the long journey called life. However, using keyboard shortcuts is an easy way to gain a techy image at the workplace. I guess ALT-TAB is the mother of all keyboard shortcuts and the once used most often. Your primary aid to move away from that Anna Kournikova site to the development environment when you see ur manager approaching. Then comes the big brother of ALT-TAB that is ALT-SHIFT-TAB, to move in reverse order. I guess this one is handier; less frequently used and is less popular. An analogy between these two and the famous siblings Mycroft Holmes and his younger brother S. Holmes won't be completely out of place. Use WIN-TAB to move through the taskbar items.

WIN-D or WIN-M is inevitable when you have a 43 windows open and still want to open that pic you saved on your desktop. Incase you want to un-minimize all the windows you just minimized, WIN-SHIFT-M is what you should try. ALT-F4 or CTRL-F4 to close the application or the document is also widely used. How many of you use ALT-SPACEBAR-X to maximize the current window? Or ALT-SPACEBAR-N to minimize the same... In fact, ALT-SPACEBAR-C is a faster and more economical (in terms of hand/finger movements) way to close an application. Even CTRL-W closes a document.

Invoking the menu items comes next. Like ALT-F for File menu, ALT-T for Tools menu and so on... Its easy to migrate from menu to submenu. ALT-F-S saves your document and ALT-F-A opens the 'Save As' dialogue box. You can even remember key code sequences... say ALT-D-F-F will put an auto filter in an excel sheet. And if you want to insert a page break in your word doc, just finger in ALT-I-B and an enter.

SHIFT-F10 is as good as right clicking and ALT-ENTER opens up the properties dialogue of a selected item. CTRL-TAB does the document shift in tabbed applications like FireFox. CTRL-PAGE DOWN and CTRL-PAGE UP travels through the sheets in an excel file.

F1 is universal for help. I heard these days, even those people drowning at Miami Beach call out F1 to get bay watcherss' attention. F2 renames and F3 finds again, whats already searched using a CTRL-F. Even WIN-F opens the file/folder find dialogue.

Fiddling around within a document too has many key codes. CTRL-S saves docs in most applications. CTRL-RIGHT ARROW and CTRL-LEFT ARROW jumps words. CTRL-HOME takes you to the top of the document and CTRL-END to the bottom. CTRL-B and CTRL-I to make selected text bold and italics respectively. As you know, CTRL-F is for find and CTRL-G opens up a page find or a line find dialogue box.

Ok... now comes some key cuts which are not so short but are faster considering the time you spend in figuring out where the mouse is, then swirling it violently twice to figure out where the cursor is and so on. Hit WIN-R and you get the Run prompt. Now if you key in 'winword' and hit enter, MS Word opens. 'iexplore' will open up IE and if you want the windows explorer, use 'explorer'. But then, its easier to use WIN-E to open windows explorer. From the run prompt, there are other codes like 'notepad', 'mspaint', 'devenv'... And if you ever want to open services under Administrative Tools, keying in 'services.msc' in Run prompt and hitting an enter is all that you need to do.

Now a long cut. CTRL-ESC opens start menu. (why not WIN key?).

Time for me to hit WIN-L to logoff...

(This was just the tip of the iceberg... pls do chip in with your fav shortcuts...)