11 April 2003

Keyboard Quickies

We often tout the advantages of knowing your keyboard shortcuts. The fact is, you can do things faster with a keyboard than with a mouse. Here are some particularly useful keystrokes.

Ctrl-Esc: Display the Start menu (if you have a keyboard with no Windows logo key).

Alt-Esc and Alt-Shift-Esc: Cycle forward and backward through all open program windows. Hold Alt or Alt-Shift down and keep hitting Esc.

Alt-Tab: Cycle through the icons of open program windows to select an application. Hold the Alt key down and hit Tab to move from one program to the next. Release both keys to go to the program.

Ctrl-F6 and Ctrl-Shift-F6: Cycle forward or backward though all the open document windows in a single program, like Microsoft Word.

Shift-Del: Delete files rather than just sending them to the Recycle Bin.

Shift plus any of the arrow keys: Select multiple contiguous items in a list or file folder.

Ctrl-A: Select all.