6DecEssential keyboard shortcuts for Windows

Someone once told me that every time you take your hand off the keyboard to use the mouse, you’re wasting valuable time. That advice has stuck with me over the years, and where possible I always strive to use keyboard shortcuts. Here are some of the more common (and useful) shortcuts which can help you gain back valuable time.

-Alt+Printscreen–takes a screenshot of the currently focused window. Note if you’re trying to take a screen grab of a video, you may need to first turn off hardware acceleration, because video often by passes the regular screen buffer.

-Ctrl+Printscreen–takes a screenshot of the entire screen. This is particularly useful for when you need to take a screenshot of a dropdown menu, whereby pressing Alt + Printscreen would normally cause that menu to hide. Of course you will need to crop the image afterwards.

-Ctrl+Escape–display/hide the Windows start menu.

-Ctrl+Tab–this is commonly used in multi-document applications like older versions of Word, to jump between documents. However this does not apply to newer versions of Word, so you will need to try this combo in a given application to see what effect it has.

-Alt+Tab or Windows+tab–allows you to jump between currently running applications. The latter option is a relatively new feature of Windows which shows a 3D view of all running applications. However it requires a fairly up-to-date keyboard with a Windows key. Note that also holding down shift with either of these combos will cycle backwards through the list of applications.

-Alt+Ascii Character Code–used in text/word processors, holding down alt and entering an ascii code will display the corresponding character. Ie: Alt + 0151 will display an em-dash. Unfortunately for some commonly used characters such as the em-dash, this is the only way to create these characters.

-Ctrl+S, O, P, N–from left to right these will typically save, open, print or create a new document.

-Ctrl+A, X, C–from left to right these will typically select all, cut and copy document information.

-Ctrl+Z/Ctrl+Alt+Z–these will typically undo and redo an operation. Note that in some cases the latter is accomplished with Ctrl+Y.