PSSsst! Have I Got Some Shortcuts for You Mar 13 '01    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Software Microsoft Windows 7 Professional From $21 Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010 From $84 The Bottom Line There is always (ok, usually) a shortcut to do what you do. Minimizing All Windows Okay, so here you are working and you want to get to something on your desktop. Unfortunately, you’ve got some 15 windows open (I mean, you are working after all) and minimizing them one by one just seems to take too long. Well, use the Minimize All Windows feature of the Start bar. To use: right click on any part of the Start bar (that’s the bar across the bottom) that is not a button of a window you have open, then choose Minimize All Windows. To get the stuff back as it was, do the same thing but choose Undo Minimize All. Copying the Current Window to the Clipboard Okay, why would you want to do this? Well, I use it all the time to put screen shots in documentation I am writing (either for a Word document or the web). I’ve also used it to e-mail the computer support people with the error that is appearing on the screen. There are two ways to do this: Alt + [PrtScn] – copies only the active window Ctrl + [PrtScn] – copies the entire desktop as it appears Once you hit this key combination (and by the way, PrtScn is the print screen button located above the arrow keys) the image is in the clipboard. You will need to paste the image somewhere to see it. Speaking of Pasting Okay, so these are obvious to most people these days, but just in case: Ctrl + X - cuts highlighted text to the clipboard Ctrl + C – copies highlighted text to the clipboard Ctrl + V – pastes whatever is on the clipboard These are very easy to remember … the x, c, and v are right next to each other on the keyboard. Using the Keyboard for EVERYTHING Look up at the menu bar of your browser for a second (if you are using any form of Windows for a PC … of course, I have no idea why’d you be reading the epinion if you were on, let’s say, Linux). Do you notice that each menu item has an underlined letter? Those are there for keyboard use. Let’s say you want to get the File menu with your keyboard. Obviously just pressing the letter F on the keyboard isn’t going to do a darn thing. The first thing you need to do is activate the menu. To activate the menu, you just need to press the ALT key once. The menu is now activated, and pressing F will lower the File menu. To de-activate a menu item, there isn’t much to it really, you just press ALT again. Once the menu is activated, you can also use your directional arrow keys to move along the menus. If you do this, hit the ENTER key to choose a menu item. Here are some other handy tips for exclusively using your keyboard to operate windows (this section can also be titled ‘Mouse Haters’): * You can use your keyboard in a dialog box (a dialog box is any window that comes up as part of another program generally to ask you for more information or to give you information). To access a particular item, look for the underlined letter you must hit, then do so while also holding down the ALT key. To move among items in a dialog box, press your TAB key. Once you get to the item you want in a dialog box you can use the space bar to check/uncheck check boxes and to select/unselect radio buttons. If you have alighted on a button, use the ENTER key to do the action. * To get to the system menu, this is the menu that appears if you click the icon for the application at the top left of a window, right next to the title, press ALT + SpaceBar. This is handy because you can minimize a window without clicking the minimize button. * ALT + TAB circulates through open windows. Doing this once, goes to the last active window you had up. Holding down the ALT key and pressing TAB several times takes you through all the open windows and a handy window box appears showing you which window you are selecting. * To get the Start menu to appear, press CTRL + ESC. Some of you have the handy button programmed to do this already on your keyboards, but if you don’t, CTRL + ESC works. Finding Your Shortcuts All (okay most) applications have keyboard shortcuts associated with their most common features. To see what keyboard shortcut is associated with that feature, you simply look down the right hand side of the menu. For example, let’s say you use ALT + Spacebar to see the System menu (as I taught you before). Go ahead, try it. You’ll see towards the bottom of that menu that Close has a keyboard combination to the right of it. The keyboard combination is ALT + F4. You can use this combination INSTEAD of the menus (either accessed through the mouse or keyboard) to close the window. The application you use will have its own keyboard shortcuts; however, remember that the key combination will probably only work in that application. I’ve shown you some that work everywhere, but there may be some in your application that won’t. Okay, ALT + F4 was the last one I wanted to show you today. When I taught Windows, I used to show folks just for kicks, seven different ways to close a window. I’ll spare you. Good Computing!

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