Windows Keyboard Shortcut of the Day

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.