Don’t do more work than you have to

Culture | November 16th, 2017

I really like shortcuts. In my later years I have had my hair cut shorter because it is faster in the mornings. Anything to speed up my life, and make it easier.

I found a shortcut that 90% of Windows computer users don’t know about. This is a great parlor trick for Geek cocktail parties.

Say you’re looking for a specific word on a web page. Instead of scanning the page yourself, all you need to do is press Ctrl+F and type the word you’re looking for. Keep this a secret and ask your computer-savvy friends this question. See how many of them give you a puzzled look. If you are not on a web page use the Windows key + F to do the same thing.

The great thing about computers is that they can do a lot of things much faster than a human. There are mountains of shortcuts like this, from pressing Ctrl+S to instantly save the file you’re working on, Ctrl+P to print it out, or Ctrl+T to open a new tab in your web browser. It may seem like more trouble than it’s worth at first, but after you use a shortcut one or two times, you’ll wonder why you ever did anything with the mouse.

Control+N: Pressing Control+N is the command for creating something new. In a web browser, this will make a new window. In a word processing, image editing, or other document-based application this keyboard shortcut will create a new document.

Control+S: Now that you know how to create a new document with your keyboard, you should also know how to save one. Control+S is the keyboard shortcut for saving a document. If this is the first time you've saved the document you'll be presented with a new window that'll ask you what to name it and where you want to save it. If you've already saved it once before, this keyboard shortcut will simply save your changes.

Control+P: If you want to print the document you just made, Control+P is the keyboard shortcut that will open the print window. From there you'll be able to check your settings, choose a printer, etc. When you're ready, just click print and your document will be printed. This keyboard shortcut works in pretty much any application with printable content, including your web browser.

Alt+F4: Alt-F4 (and sometimes Control+W or Control+Q) is the keyboard shortcut for quitting the current application. In Windows it will quit the currently open that's in focus on the screen. To know which application is going to quit when you perform this keyboard command, just look in the upper left corner to see its name.

Enter: The enter key is useful for a lot of things. When a dialog window pops up and asks you to press okay or cancel, you can usually just press Enter instead of clicking okay. In Windows you can tell which button will respond to enter because it'll have a dotted box inside of it. Enter can also be used for other things, like submitting forms on web pages from any text field in that form.These are just a few shortcuts to get you started.

These shortcuts have been around for many versions of Windows. You can find many more of them by searching for Windows 7 (or 10) shortcuts. Believe me, it will save you time.

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