Improve productivity using Windows keyboard shortcuts - By: Rodney J Smith

It's no understatement to say that Microsoft Windows has changed the world. The elegant simplicity of using the mouse for point and click activation is brilliant, and so easy that our kids can do it. But there are times when using the mouse can be a pain (quite literally if you suffer from a Repetitive Strain Injury) or just plain inefficient. Investing some time in learning a few keyboard shortcuts for common tasks can save you a lot of time in the long run with the resulting increase in productivity.

Despite all the wonderful multimedia applications that our computers now come equipped with as standard, most of us spend the majority of our time performing text-based activities with our computers: writing letters, issuing invoices, analysing spreadsheet data, programming computers, to name but a few. Here are some basic keystrokes that can streamline these activities:

Navigation
Use the arrow keys to move the cursor position up, down, left or right a character at a time. Page Up and Page Down move up or down a page at a time, while Home and End jump to the beginning or end of a line respectively. Holding down the Control key while pressing Home or End moves the cursor to the very top or bottom of the document. To move left or right a whole word at a time, hold down Control while using the Left or Right arrow key.

Pressing Alt-Tab brings the previous application you used back to the front, so you can quickly switch from one open application to another. Holding down the Alt key while repeatedly pressing Tab means you can select an arbitrary running application. Adding in the Shift key at the same time reverses the order in which the applications get selected.

Cut, copy and paste
When working with text I always find myself editing on the fly: changing the order of words, clauses, sentences or even whole paragraphs. It generally takes two mouse clicks to select the Cut, Copy or Paste command from a menu, yet you can do the same thing in a fraction of the time using Ctrl-X (cut), Ctrl-C (copy) or Ctrl-V (paste).

Highlighting text
Using the keyboard for cut-n-paste operations is not very helpful if you still have to use the mouse to select the text. But you guessed it - you can use the keyboard for that too. Holding down the Shift key in conjunction with any of the navigation commands mentioned above will result in highlighting all text between the cursor's point of origin and eventual destination. So for example, to select the previous word, press Ctrl-Shift-Left Arrow simultaneously; to select all text from the cursor position to the end of the line, press Shift-End.

It takes a little practice to become proficient with these keystrokes, but once you get the hang of it I'm sure you'll agree it can dramatically speed up your work. In fact you'll find you need to use Ctrl-S a lot more often (that's the shortcut to Save your work)!

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