10 Time Saving Keyboard Shortcuts
 by: Steve Robson

Time is money. And when you constantly have to divide your time between your mouse and your keyboard, your workflow rate really slows down.

That's particularly true when you're working on a laptop, where the pointing device is even slower.

The answer - short of growing another arm - is to learn a few "handy" keyboard shortcuts. Here are 10 of the best:

1. Make a quick exit:

ALT - F4 will terminate any program immediately.

2. Flick - don't click:

ALT - TAB to flick through open programs.

3. Make a quick selection:

CTRL - SHIFT and move cursor with left / right / up / down arrows to quickly select areas of text.

4. Cut, copy and paste to the chase:

CTRL - X / C / V to cut, copy and paste selected text.

5. Undo what you've done:

CTRL - Z will undo anything. (And to redo: CTRL - Y although this varies between programs.)

6. Page - don't scroll:

In MSIE use Page Up & Page Down to save time fiddling with the scroll bar.

7. E for explorer:

WINDOWS KEY - E to open windows explorer. Use up and down arrows to quickly navigate through folders.

8. Rapidly rename:

F2 - rename a file or folder in Windows Explorer

9. Find it fast:

CTRL - F to find text on a page (And CTRL - H replace it).

10. Fly through forms:

Use TAB to move forward through forms and SHIFT-TAB to move backwards

After a little practice, your fingers will be flying across the keyboard like a shortcut pro.

And you'll save a huge amount of time too.

This article was posted on May 23, 2004