Some Keyboard Shortcuts to Help You Save Time

By Sara McFarland
Contributing Writer

Have you ever witnessed a Powerpoint presentation during which the presenter accidentally skips over five slides and then has to go through the painful process of right clicking and selecting “Previous slide” multiple times? If you’re like me, your inner voice would be screaming “left arrow!” “backspace!” “pageup!” or, simply, “p!” Yes, there are actually four ways to go backwards through a Powerpoint presentation using your keyboard.

Why do I dwell on this fact? Am I really that agitated or concerned when someone laboriously clicks backwards through their slides? No. In the realm of things, I’d much rather concentrate on the presentation. However, as a passionate keyboard advocate, I would like to remind everyone that there are a wealth of handy tools and tricks that are available right at your fingertips through keyboard shortcuts.

I’m confident that most people have the classic repertoire of ctrl-c, ctrl-x, and ctrl-v under their belts, but I would like to present some other handy shortcuts that I’ve discovered along the way. I’m sure most of you will be familiar with at least a few of them, but hopefully there will be something new in there somewhere. Also, just to be clear, ctrl is the “control” key in Windows (or the “command” key in Macs).

Selecting Text (ctrl-a and shift-arrow etc.):
One of my most-used shortcuts is ctrl-a. It selects all of the text within reach of your cursor. This is very handy for say, quickly highlighting a url in the address bar. The next powerhouse in selecting text is the shift key. This key can be combined with a number of other keys to highlight as little or as much text as you need. One or two letters? Hold down shift and tap the right or left arrow key. A few words? Hold down shift and ctrl, and tap an arrow key (alt/option key instead of ctrl for Mac users). Windows users can also try holding down shift and then hitting “home” or “end” to select up to the end or the beginning of the line. You can also use shift in conjunction with your mouse. Try holding down shift and then placing your cursor in a different spot. This can be invaluable when highlighting enormously long sections of data in Excel.

Switching windows/programs (alt-tab or command-tab/~ in Macs):
While highlighting text is no doubt very exciting, this next trick, when implemented properly, has the advantage of making you look really adept with computers. Let’s say that you have to switch between two windows or programs fairly often. Instead of using the mouse to manually click to focus on either one, use alt-tab. Simply hold down alt, tap tab, and then release both keys. The last window that you had selected will now be at the forefront of your screen. If you’d like to go backwards to say, a window that you had selected a while ago, hold down alt, repeatedly tap tab until the desired window is highlighted in the menu that appears, and then let go of both keys again. Note that in Macs, the shortcut is command-tab to switch among programs and command-~ to switch among windows within a program.

Tabbing and reverse tabbing through forms (tab and shift-tab):
I’m sure everyone realizes that pressing the tab key will take you to the password box after you’ve entered your username, but it took me a while to figure out that if I needed to go backwards one field to fix my mistyped username, I could press shift-tab instead of manually plopping the cursor back with my mouse. In short, tab will take you forward a field in a form, and shift-tab will take you backward a field.

Undo and Redo (ctrl-z and ctrl-y):
I’m guessing that most people are familiar with this one. Ctrl-z undoes the last thing that you did in a particular program (like accidentally deleting a large block of text). Feel free to try it whenever it might come in handy. I’ve been pleasantly surprised when it restored a few emails that I had inadvertently just deleted. Want to undo what you undid? To revert back to what things were like before the undo, press ctrl-y. Ctrl-y will go one step forward in your edit history, but beware, you can only do this right after you’ve undone something, otherwise there will be nothing to “redo.”

Now you should be able to quickly switch from your Internet browser to the paper you might be writing (alt-tab), select all of it in one fell swoop (ctrl-a), accidentally press delete, and then miraculously restore it to its unfettered condition (ctrl-z), all without leaving the comfort of your keyboard!