Windows Keyboard Shortcut of the Day

Suppose you’ve used the mouse to scroll too far in Excel. You’re lost. The cells are zooming by at a million miles an hour. You just want to get back to see the cell where your cursor is. Help! Scrolling around to find the active cell will take forever!
Ctrl+Backspace moves the visible area of the spreadsheet back to whereever your cursor is (the so-called active cell).

To move to the right in Excel to see your next group of columns, you could scroll. Or you could press the Right Arrow key a bunch of times.

Or, press Alt+Page Up. You immediately find yourself one screen to the right looking at your next batch of columns.

Conversely, Alt+Page Down moves you to the left.

(Compare to the regular Page Up and Page Down, which you already know moves you up and down a screen.)

Don’t click on the Insert menu and then the Worksheet command. Don’t even press Alt+I, W. Just press Shift+F11 and a brand new worksheet is created for you in Excel.

When you’re using Excel 2003 or later, from time to time it’ll point out mistakes in your formulas or other observations by indicating a green triangle in the upper left of the cell, along with an exclamation point in a yellow diamond. The idea is you click on the diamond to see a menu with some options from Excel.

Clicking? Moi? Nope, instead of reaching for the mouse, just press Alt+Shift+F10, and the menu then opens. (Just have your cursor somewhere in the cell with the Smart Tag.) Once the menu appears, it’s just a regular menu, and you can use the Up Arrow or Down Arrow plus Enter to select an item, or press Esc to cancel.

Similarly, in Microsoft Word, sometimes you’ll be typing and Word will make a correction and show a blue double underline. Move your mouse to the underline and a yellow lightning bolt appears. Click on the lightning bolt and you’ll have some menu items to control the behavior of whatever automatic correction Word made.

Again, clicking? No need. The same Alt+Shift+F10 will open the Smart Tag menu in Word. Just have your cursor somewhere in the word with the double blue underline.

Here’s the last of our Firefox tips, in celebration of the release of Firefox 3 last week.

We previously covered Ctrl+K to jump to the search box in the upper right. If you happen to use the Google toolbar, Ctrl+K has a different function, so some of you may prefer to use Ctrl+E to jump up there instead.

Now for the next step! Once your cursor is up there in the search box, type in a search term but do NOT press Enter to search yet.

Instead, you can press Alt+Down Arrow to pull down the list of search engines available. Then you can use the Up Arrow and Down Arrow to select a search engine, and then press Enter to search using that engine.

Firefox will remember your choice until the next time you change the engine using that same Alt+Down Arrow pulldown menu.
You can always use the Manage Search Engines menu item to edit your list of search engines. To add more, just press Tab Tab Enter from the Manage Search Engine List dialog box in order to hit that “Get more search engines…” link.

Sometimes when you reload a page, you get the same old crufty stuff even though you KNOW there’s an update.

Why is that? Well, when you load a page, your browser stores a local copy on your computer — this is called a cache. Whenever you visit a page, Firefox asks the remote server if there’s any update to the version that’s saved locally. If the host says yes, then Firefox fetches the updated page. If the last updated date is not after the date of the one you have locally, then Firefox displays the version from your cache instead, saving bandwidth and time.

Occasionally this screws up (usually because the host is returning bad info about when the page was updated). So if you just KNOW there’s an update, you need to reload the page, overriding the cache.

To do that, press Ctrl+Shift+R, or Ctrl+F5 — this is sometimes called a “forced reload.”

You already know you can press Ctrl+T to open a new tab in Firefox, and then press Ctrl+L to change focus to the location bar, where you can start typing the URL and press Enter to go to the page.

Try out this sequence instead — you might find it more intuitive.

1. Press Ctrl+L (or Alt+D or F6) to move your focus to the address bar.
2. Start typing the URL. At this point, Firefox’s address completion kicks in, and you can use the up and down arrow keys to select the site you want to visit.
3. Instead of pressing Enter to open the site, or Ctrl+Enter to turn “tivo” into “http://www.tivo.com,” try pressing Alt+Enter. The site you have selected automatically opens in a new tab. Whatever page you were viewing stays in its own tab.

Even faster, you can also press Ctrl+Alt+Enter to automatically complete the URL in a new tab. So:

1. Press Ctrl+L to move your focus to the address bar.
2. Type a word for the domain name, such as google.
3. Press Ctrl+Alt+Enter. The domain name is turned into a full URL (so “google” becomes “http://www.google.com/”) and a new tab is opened with that page.

Suppose you’re in a library or using someone else’s computer. You don’t want them to see your form submissions or list of visited sites, right? That’s your business, not theirs.

Ctrl+Shift+Del and a dialog box appears, with some default items to clear checked, and others not. (Remember you can use Tab and Space to change the checkmarks.) Once you press Enter, you’ve just wiped out all of your history (and theirs too, for that matter). Bookmarks do stay.

(Under Tools | Options, there’s a Privacy tab. Sadly you have to use the mouse to select this tab. Once there, you can select the “Always clear my private data when I close Firefox” option, if you find yourself clearing private data frequently. This option is off by default.)

In Firefox, once you’ve opened a new tab (with Ctrl+T, remember?), you already knew you could use Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down to switch tabs.

But you can also use Ctrl followed by a number key.

• Ctrl+1: Switch to the first tab
• Ctrl+2: Switch to the second tab
• Ctrl+3: Switch to the third tab
• Ctrl+4: Switch to the fourth tab
• Ctrl+5: Switch to the fifth tab
• Ctrl+6: Switch to the sixth tab
• Ctrl+7: Switch to the seventh tab
• Ctrl+8: Switch to the eighth tab
• Ctrl+9: Switch to the LAST tab

No matter how many tabs you have open, Ctrl+9 will switch to the one that’s on the far right.

(You may wonder: What does Ctrl+0 do? Well, if you’ve used Ctrl+= or Ctrl+- to change the font sizes on a page, Ctrl+0 sets all the font sizes back to the default.)

Firefox 3, released officially yesterday, has a brand new keyboard shortcut that lets you organize your bookmarks, Ctrl+Shift+B.

(In previous versions of Firefox, to use this menu item, you’d have to hit Alt+B to open the Bookmarks menu, then press the Down Arrow key until Organize Bookmarks was highlighted, then press Enter.)

Just recently I received a new laptop, and found that by default, the keyboard shortcuts in menus weren’t displayed.

This is the enemy of all keyboard users: An option hidden away in the Display settings that hides the underlined letters telling you what keys you can press. Boo on Microsoft for making this a default.

To enable keyboard shortcut underlining, follow these steps:

1. Hit Windows+D to show the desktop.
2. Press Shift+F10 to show the shortcut menu.
3. Press up arrow to get to the bottom menu item, Properties, then press Enter to select it.
4. Press Ctrl+Tab to change tabs three times, until the Appearance tab appears.
5. Press Alt+E to hit the Effects button.
6. Deselect the last item by pressing H.
7. Press Enter twice to close the dialog boxes.

Whenever you have an application screen with multiple sections, try pressing F6 to cycle between them.

In Firefox, it toggles between the address bar and the web page — unless you’re viewing a web page with frames, in which case each press of F6 moves you to a different frame.
In Outlook, you can switch between the header of an e-mail (where you type the To address, Subject, etc.) and the body of the e-mail.

In PowerPoint, you’ll move between the slide, the notes, and the outline on the left.

Ever think to yourself, “What was that web site I visited yesterday? Something about shoes?”

In your browser, press Ctrl+H. A side panel appears, showing a history of sites you’ve visited.

In Firefox, the cursor appears in a Search box by default, so type in “shoes” and press Enter, and you’ll find sites with that word in the title or URL.

There’s also a View button. Press Alt+W, then Spacebar, and you can organize your browser history window by site, date, most visited, or most recently visited instead of the default that shows a combination of date and site.

When you’re done with the history sidebar, press Ctrl+H to toggle it off.

In Firefox, tap the F11 key and all of a sudden, plenty of screen clutter disappears, allowing you to view the current web page without as much distraction.

Sure, there’s the tool bar (and possibly the tab bar, if more than one tab is open) on the top, and the find bar (if open) on the bottom. But other than that, just you and your web page.

Hit F11 again to turn full-screen mode off.

Ever have an annoying situation in Firefox where you start filling out a form, but when it helpfully tries to finish your typing for you with some personal information, you see a typo in there? And you think, “Woah, that’s wrong — I don’t want that text ever popping up again.”

Well, here’s how to fix it.

Next time you see the auto-complete entry appear, try this: press the down arrow to highlight the entry you want to remove, then press Shift+Delete. The entry disappears.

This works in the address bar as well!

Note: The saved text will return if you enter that text again — so either don’t make that typo again, or consider disabling Firefox’s form-fill feature under Tools | Options | Privacy | Remember what I enter in Forms and the search bar.

Since I already published a Windows shortcut today, here’s a bonus for you Mac users, with thanks again to Kevin Fox.

Suppose you’re using a Mac and you’re creating a selection rectangle in Photoshop. Normally, moving the mouse changes the size of the selection rectangle. If you hold down the Spacebar, suddenly you’re now moving the origin of the rectangle instead. (Practice this a bit to get the hang of it.)

Many of you are old hands at Photoshop and already knew that one. (You may have known it works in Windows versions of Photoshop as well, plus many other image editors on both platforms.)

Okay, so here’s the new bit: If you use OS X, as of 10.5, when you press Command+Shift+4 to capture part of the screen, you can now use the Spacebar trick to switch between resizing and changing the origin point.

Suppose you’re using Firefox, and you end up on a web page with a bunch of files you want to save. You can right-click on each link, choose “Save Link As…” then click OK, then repeat over and over. What a pain!

Here’s a faster way.

First, press Tab until you get to the link you want to save. (You may have to press Tab quite a few times, depending on the page. One hint is to first scroll down so that the link you want to save is at the top of the page. Or, click on the link and drag down a little bit before letting go off the mouse button, which will select the link without clicking on it.)

Once the link you want to save is highlighted, press Alt+Enter and the Downloads window appears, showing your progress as file is saved.

Now press Alt+Tab to switch back from the Downloads window to your main browser window, or close the Downloads window (by pressing Ctrl+W or Alt+F4).

Now you can repeat: Tab, Alt+Enter, Alt+F4, Tab, Alt+Enter, Alt+F4 — and keep repeating until all the files are saved.

(By the way, in Internet Explorer, pressing Alt+Enter just does the same thing as Enter — it follows the link as if you clicked on it. In many other applications, we saw previously that Alt+Enter opens the Properties menu.)

So lately the “…of the Day” portion of this blog’s title has been a big lie. I figure, why not make the “Windows” part a lie too? My friend Kevin “Fury” Fox just sent me this tip for Mac users:

If you hold down Shift and Option while using the keyboard volume keys, you can increase or decrease the volume in quarter steps.

Normally there are 17 levels of volume. If you use Shift+Option, you can get 64 levels of volume — great for when you want something just a little bit louder or softer.

Disclaimer: I don’t have a Mac, and haven’t used one in 10 years, so I have no personal experience with this.

When using Google maps, once you click in the map region, you can use the following keyboard controls:

Arrow keys: Move the map up, down, left or right.

+ key: Zoom in (you can use = instead of + too)
- key: Zoom out

Makes a nice alternative to dragging sometimes!

Major applications support Shift+F1 to let you know what a particular part of the screen is about. Hit Shift+F1 and your point turns into an arrow with a question mark (presuming your application supports this feature). Then click on something you want to know about, and some contextual help will appear.

We’ve covered custom keyboard shortcuts before, but today I’m going to focus on how to call up your favorite web site with just one keystroke. We’ll review some previously covered keyboard shortcuts along the way.

1. Minimize everything and show the Desktop with Windows+D. The Desktop appears.
2. Call up the shortcut menu with Shift+F10. A shortcut menu appears. (This won’t work if you have a desktop item selected. Another way to do this step is to just right-click on an empty part of the desktop.)
3. Use the arrow keys and Enter to select the New command, or press the W key to select New (since the w is underlined, that’s the shortcut key). A sub-menu appears.
4. Select “Shortcut” by using the down arrow and Enter. The Create Shortcut dialog box appears.
5. Enter in the URL for your favorite web site. Include the http:// part, so for example, enter in http://www.tivo.com/ if you want to visit TiVo.com. Press Alt+N to click the Next button. The “Select a Title for the Program” screen appears.
6. Type in a title for this shortcut (it doesn’t really matter what you type). For example, you could type “TiVo” if you entered tivo.com. Then press Enter to Finish. The shortcut appears on the desktop.
7. Press the first letter of the title you just entered. You may have to hit that letter more than once if you have multiple items on your Desktop all named with the same first letter. Eventually your item is selected.
8. Press Alt+Enter to get the Properties menu for this item.
9. Press Tab to select the Shortcut Key text box. Enter in a keystroke you’d like to use to call up this item. For TiVo, for example, you might enter Ctrl+Alt+T. Your keystroke must use either Ctrl+Alt, Ctrl+Shift, or Shift+Alt.
10. Press Enter to finish creating the shortcut to your favorite web site with your custom shortcut key.

Try it! Press your custom keystroke and notice how a web browser appears and your web page is loaded.

Now write down your new shortcut on a sticky note so you don’t forget and so you get in the habit of using it!

Note: If you create more than one shortcut with the same keystroke, the first shortcut created has priority.

Four-month-olds are pretty challenging, and there’s little free time right now, so for a while longer we’re going to keep this as a “Windows Keyboard Shortcut of the Week” blog. Sorry for the inconvenience, and I do aim to return to daily comments when I can.

In a lot of applications (Excel, PowerPoint, Word and many more), Ctrl+K lets you insert a hyperlink. Now, links may not be so useful in a printed document, but for online documents, try it out.

Start by moving your cursor to the location where you want a hyperlink to appear. Then press Ctrl+K and the “Insert Hyperlink” dialog box appears. Now, enter a complete URL (such as http://www.tivo.com) in the Address input (where your cursor will be by default). If you had no text selected beforehand, then press Alt+T to get to the “Text to display” box and enter in the anchor text (such as “TiVo”). Press Enter, and the text appears as a link.
You can also use a network address to link your document to another one on a hard drive (by entering a URL such as \\my-server\mydirectory\).

Suppose you close a browser window tab in Firefox with Ctrl+W.

Whoops! Wait a second, I wanted to read that!

To re-open it, press Ctrl+Shift+T. Phew!

If you use Thunderbird as your e-mail program, you can label an e-mail you have selected with the number keys.

By default, these keys will apply the label and color listed:

• 1: Important (red)
• 2: Work (yellow)
• 3: Personal (green)
• 4: To Do (blue)
• 5: Later (purple)
• 0: Clear all labels (black)

Well, I said “December” but here we are in January. Time flies when you’ve got a toddler and an infant and a full-time job!

While we won’t be daily for a while (thus making a lie of the “of the Day” portion of the title of this blog), we’ll start back in on some tips.

Good to be back!

I haven’t forgotten about this site, but with a two month old baby, things are still very hectic. I do plan to return to writing daily keyboard shortcuts starting in December, so please check back then.

We’ll be taking a break from daily tips for a while due to a paternity leave. In the meantime, please leave keyboard shortcut requests here.

What tasks do you handle all the time that are a pain with the mouse? What are your own best productivity tips involving the keyboard?

Sadly, there’s no escaping spam. But at least you can make it easier to deal with. Just press the exclamation mark key (shift+1) and the current conversation is instantly moved to the Spam folder in Gmail. There it will be deleted automatically after 30 days.

Here’s a keyboard shortcut for a Gmail function you can’t really access any other way than by enabling the keyboard.

If you get some mail that’s annoying but not spam and you don’t care to read any of the responses to that conversation, just press the “m” key. It then mutes the conversation so that it’s archived, AND, any future messages that arrive in that conversation are automatically archived, never sullying your inbox. Handy!

To move the current message conversation into the Archive, just press the “y” key.

If you’re in the “Starred” section, Y will un-star the message.

If you’re in a custom labeled section, Y will remove that label. (For example, if you have a label for “Personal” and you’ve clicked on that Personal label link, so all of the messages you’re viewing are tagged as “Personal,” then the Y will remove the Personal label from the current message, meaning it will also be removed from the current view.)

If you’re in the Spam or Sent or All Mail section, the Y key does nothing.

Fire up Gmail, and chances are you’re going to want to search for a particular message. The quickest way to do that is hit the / (slash key, down by the question mark) which jumps your cursor up into the search box. Type in your search phrase and press Enter. After a few seconds, you’ll see a list of messages with that phrase.

Now you can use J and K (as we discussed) to move up and down messages, and Enter to open a message. When you’re all done, don’t forget G, I to go back to the Inbox.

I’d like to thank Russell Bradley-Cook for urging me to spend some time on Gmail, and for pointing out that the J and K keys can be used even when you’re reading messages. Try it out!

We’ll spend some more time on Gmail next week.

Once you’ve press Enter to read an e-mail, there are a number of options. But to start with, to go back to the main inbox, press G then I. No shifts or controls or anything like that, just the “g” key followed by the “i” key.

Once you’ve enabled keyboard shortcuts in gmail, one of the first things you’ll see is the “>” symbol appear next to the list of messages in your inbox. You can press the “j” key to move down a message, and the “k” key to move up a message. When you get a message you want to read, press Enter.

Why J and K? If you’re an old crusty computer user like me, you may recognize these as shortcuts from an ancient Unix editor called “vi.” I happen to know the lead user interface designer of Gmail — Kevin Fox. I asked him yesterday about the reasoning behind using these keys. Kevin is not a vi user, and he picked J and K because they were easy to type keys situated next to each other that didn’t have any other use. Originally he had proposed it backwards, with J for next and K for previous, based on the reasoning that most of the time you want to read the next message, so that should be the first key. But all the old vi users at Google convinced him to reverse it. He grudgingly did so, but only if the team promised to change it if they got complaints. They never received any complaints, so the keys have stayed.

Don’t bother with the regular “C” to compose; get in the habit of using Shift+C to compose a new mail in a new window, where it doesn’t interfere with your normal work.

From the regular Gmail screen, just hit Shift+C (after you’ve enabled keyboard shortcuts, per the previous post). A new window appears. Remember you can use the standard Alt+Tab to switch windows, or Ctrl+W to close the window (without saving or sending) if you change your mind about composing a new message.

This week we’ll cover keyboard shortcuts for Gmail, the free online e-mail service from Google.

First things first: In order to use keyboard shortcuts with Gmail, you have to switch them on. (They’re off by default.) To enable keystrokes, follow these steps:

1. In your favorite browser, log in to your gmail account.
2. Click on “Settings” in the upper right (next to your e-mail address).
3. In the default General tab, select the “Keyboard shortcuts on” radio button.
4. Click the “Save Settings” button at the bottom of the page.

You can reference this list of keyboard shortcuts for reference, or stay tuned here.

Sometimes you just want to see the Task Manager, which gives you a list of which applications and processes are running, lets you run new programs, and lets you kill programs.

Credit for today’s tip goes to Jake, who left a comment earlier: Ctrl+Shift+Esc will instantly produce the Task Manager.

We’ve covered a lot of Ctrl+D shortcuts previously (fill down in Excel, duplicate slide in PowerPoint, bookmark in IE and Firefox), so it’s understandable if you get a little confused about what Ctrl+D does in each application.

But, if you spend a lot of time in Microsoft Word, you might want to memorize this one and practice it today: Ctrl+D brings up the Font dialog box in Word, where you can change the font face, the font size, the font color, and a few other special formatting options. (Don’t forget you can press Ctrl+Tab to change the tabs in the dialog box to change character spacing and special effects.)

If you have selected text, pressing Ctrl+D will apply the font changes to whatever’s selected. Otherwise, if nothing’s selected, it’ll affect what you type next.

In Word, sometimes you want to create what’s called a “hanging indent” (where the first line of a paragraph is at the usual spot on the left margin, but all the subsequent lines in that paragraph are moved in to the next tab stop).

Find a paragraph that’s more than one line long, hit Ctrl+T, and you can see how it looks for yourself. Press it several times if you want to indent the second and later lines to the next tab stop.

Suppose you create a text box, and then an arrow, and move them together. Then suppose you need to move them a few times. It’s annoying to have to move each item separately, so you’ll usually want to “group” them into one object. Sure, you could find the menu commands to do that — but it’s much easier to select the two items you want, then press Ctrl+Shift+G.

Note: You can use Tab to select an object (just keep pressing Tab until the object you want is selected), but there’s no way that I know of to select multiple objects in PowerPoint via the keyboard.

Once an object is grouped, just use the arrow keys to move it around.

Select some text in Word or PowerPoint, then press Shift+F3. It’ll toggle between three possibilities for text capitalization:

• Initial Letter Case
• ALL CAPS CASE
• lower case

So, if you have selected some text like “siX MILlion Dollar mAn” each time you press Shift+F3 you’ll see it switch between “SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN” and “six million dollar man” and “Six Million Dollar Man”.

However! If you add some punctuation (like a period) at the end of what’s selected, instead of using Initial Letter Case, it’ll only capitalize the first letter of the sentence. So “I wiN!” will toggle between “I WIN!” and “i win!” and “I win!” (and not ever show “I Win!”).

Bonus tip today! This follows from the earlier tip about Ctrl+Shift+Drag to create a shortcut, as well as yesterday’s tip about Ctrl+Drag to copy a file.

Let’s be complete: Suppose you’re still using the mouse to drag a file icon somewhere. And let’s suppose you’re about to drag it to a folder for a different drive (such as your A: drive or a second hard drive like D:, or a network drive like U:). Normally Windows will make a copy when you drag a file between two different drives. But if you hold down the Shift key, it’ll move the file instead.

Note that when you have the Ctrl key held down (or are dragging the file to the same drive), the ghosted-out image of the file’s icon has a little “+” in it to show it’s about to be copied.

If you have either the Alt or Ctrl+Shift keys held down, the file’s icon has a little arrow to show it’s about to be created as a shortcut.

If you have the Shift key held down, the icon is normal to show it’s being moved.

(By the way, instead of remembering all this confusing stuff about Shift or Ctrl or Alt), another choice is to use the right mouse button when dragging instead of the left mouse button. Then when you let go of the button, you will get a shortcut menu asking you what to do with the file you’re dragging. You can use the arrow keys and Enter to select your menu choice instead of clicking on the choice you want.)

Next week we’ll talk about how to use keys with the Windows Explorer so that you never have to bother with dragging a file ever again.

If you have a selected file and press Ctrl+Shift while you drag it, it will create a shortcut — a pointer. This pointer can then be put on the Start menu or placed on your desktop, or put in a folder if you need a quick way to reference the original file.

When you have to use a mouse and you drag a file into a folder, normally it gets moved (assuming you’re moving it on the same drive). If you hold down the Ctrl key while you drag the file, the file is copied instead. You’ll end up with one copy in the original location, and one copy in the new folder you dragged it to.

Previously, we saw that you can edit a cell in Excel using the F2 key.

We also have discussed dialog boxes and working with files using the Windows Explorer. In order to quickly rename a selected file, just press F2. It works a little like editing a cell in Excel.

Try this one in Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint: Select some text that has some formatting you like. Hit Ctrl+Shift+C to copy the formatting into the clipboard (nothing visible will happen).

Now scroll elsewhere and select some different text. Press Ctrl+Shift+V. Now that formatting you had copied is applied to the selected text. Magic!

To quickly remove all formatting and return text to normal, select it (in Word or PowerPoint) and hit Ctrl+Spacebar. Goodbye ugly fonts!

Ctrl+J opens up a list of the files you’ve recently downloaded.

Maybe you’ll never need this one, but sometimes you want to see the actual HTML code used to create a web page.

In Firefox, go to the page you want to view and then press Ctrl+U. A new Window appears with the HTML code visible and colored appropriately.

(In Internet Explorer, you can press Alt+V to open the View menu, then press C to select the Source command. A Notepad window appears with the HTML code available for editing.)

Remember, Alt+F4 closes a window — use that when you’re done looking at the source HTML code.

Press Ctrl+B and a new pane appears on the left side of your Firefox browser: The Bookmarks pane. Your cursor will automatically appear in the search box. Type in a few letters, and only those pages you’ve bookmarked that include those letters are listed. Press Tab to jump down to the results, and then press Enter on the one you want to open. Press Ctrl+B again to toggle off the Bookmarks pane.

(Note that in Internet Explorer, Ctrl+B lets you organize your bookmarks.)