Windows Keyboard Shortcut of the Day

Hand-in-hand with Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+End will go to the end of a document.

And you already knew that Home by itself takes you to the beginning of the line where your cursor is, and End by itself takes you to the end of the current line, right?

When editing a text document, try using Ctrl+Up Arrow to move to the beginning of the previous paragraph, or Ctrl+Down Arrow to move to the beginning of the next paragraph.

This week’s set of tips will be focused on navigation shortcuts — keyboard methods of navigating around in a document. These work for most applications, but are especially useful when you’re using Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Notepad, WordPad, or other word processing and editing programs.

Today’s tip is to use the Ctrl key plus either the Left Arrow key or the Right Arrow key. Each time you press this keystroke, you’ll move to the beginning of the previous or next word. Try each several times to get the hang of it.

In most applications, pressing Ctrl+Home will move your cursor to the very beginning of the document.

Most applications let you press Ctrl+S to save the current document.

If you have previously saved the document (or had opened an existing document), then Ctrl+S uses the same filename as before. No news is good news — if you don’t get an error message, you can assume your save worked fine.

If you haven’t saved the document yet, you will be prompted for a filename automatically. Type in the filename and press Enter.

Ctrl+S is the equivalent to clicking on the File menu and then clicking on the Save command. Note that most programs will show you the Ctrl+S shortcut next to that Save menu command (see image below). Use those visual cues!

This is a keyboard sequence, so let’s understand it in order:

• Ctrl+Esc opens the Start menu. (Instead, you could use the Windows key.)
• Pressing the u key selects whichever menu item has an underlined u. In this case, we want to select the “Shut Down…” command. The “u” in “Shut Down…” is underlined, which means you can press the u key key to select it. (Note that if your menu has other options that begin with a U, such as “User Preferences,” then you’ll have to hit u more than once and then hit Enter when Shut Down is selected.)
• A dialog box labeled “Shut Down Windows” or “Turn off computer” appears. Windows remembers the last option you selected when shutting down. If “Shut down” is the highlighted option, you can press Enter to select it. If the wrong option is selected, you can change the selected option with the arrow keys before you press Enter.

Welcome to the Windows Keyboard Shortcut of the Day blog! (You can read more about this blog if you like.)

We’ll start things off with the “Windows” key. Most computer keyboards built since 1995 have this key, usually down between the Alt and Ctrl keys, to the left of the Spacebar. On most keyboards, it looks like this:

Pressing this key (by itself) opens the Start menu. Pressing it again switches off the Start menu.

Once the Start menu is open, you can use the arrow keys to select a menu item. Pressing the Enter key launches the selected menu item.

What if you don’t have a Windows key on your keyboard? Just press Ctrl+Esc instead.