Keyboard shortcuts can often be a game changer when it comes to getting work done quickly.
Many times in business you will find that the repetitive action you have been doing for years has been pointless and there was a simple shortcut that would have saved you a lot of time and effort.
The problem is that these shortcuts are not particularly well advertised on operating systems such as Windows or Mac OS, and instead, need to be whispered in your ear from some learned individual, like having a secret ritual handed down from a tribal elder.
No matter how many years you have worked with computers as part of your daily life, or how closely linked your business is with information technology, you will still always have those moments where you find a new shortcut and say, “What?? That's all I had to press? I've been doing it the long way for years!”
Then your colleague shakes their head and smiles sadly, like you have just told them you've been trying to use the LED display on your oven to cook eggs.
Avoid that moment if you can and save yourself time and effort with the 10 best shortcuts for speeding up any work.
Windows Key + Shift + S
The snipping tool is one of those moves that needs to be passed down from a tribal shaman and is not commonly known. However, this function is particularly useful for most businesses.
It works in a similar way to the Print Screen, PrtScrn, button that captures a shot of the screen to the clipboard, but instead of taking in the whole ugly mess with all your open windows, whatever embarrassing tune you have on Spotify visible and your dodgy background wallpaper, the snipping tool takes a neat screenshot of only the active window your cursor is in.
This means that whether it is an image or a section of text, you will likely get a screenshot of just the section of screen you were after and it is much neater, meaning you don’t need to go on an image editing app and manually cut a box around it.
Have a go and see how it works, but write it down because it's easy to forget and normally needs to be Googled every time you do it.
Ctrl + Z
They say that people make mistakes and that's why pencils have erasers on the end, (or rubbers if you're in the UK and using the correct terminology). The same could be said for the ctrl and z key, and this is something of a classic that can be used to right all your wrongs and remove the last thing you did. Whether that is lines of text, a massive link you accidentally pasted that is 360 pages long, or a badly drawn scrawl that has ruined an otherwise good photograph.
Often, people are aware of ctrl + z but just not how often it can be used in more or less every application—MS PhotoViewer, MS Word, Adobe Photoshop, Google Docs, etc.
If you find you are clicking on the word Undo in a menu somewhere, you are probably wasting time on something that could be accomplished much more easily.
Ctrl + A
Another shortcut that is less commonly known is the Select All, or ctrl + A key, that will handily put a selection box around the entire block of text, document in Word, Google Docs, or even website content.
This means you don't have to manually scroll down trying to draw a box around some text on a website or document as this function will just select the whole lot in one key press.
Ctrl + C/Ctrl + V
The old copy/paste key is another classic that is sometimes underused, although in some professions, such as modern investigative journalism, it is the only key combination you will ever need.
Ctrl + C copies whatever has been selected to the clipboard for later use. This can be anything from the text you just wrote or a particularly interesting image you want to save.
Ctrl + V is the following action, which ‘pastes’ whatever you have saved to wherever the cursor is hovering.
This function is great for grabbing sections of text from a website without needing to write it all out yourself.
Ctrl + Shift + V is perhaps even more useful as it pastes the selection in plain text so it would match the rest of the document, almost like you wrote it yourself…sshh!
Ctrl + F
The find and replace key is an amazing tool for many job roles but is not always used by those who could make use of it.
How many times have you searched through a Web page or your own work, trying to find that bit you wrote or that paragraph you were going to use? Seems like it has disappeared but you just know it was there.
Well, you may be pleased to know that all that time was in fact wasted and the ctrl + F key would have found it within a second.
You can search for a single word such as “Trump” and find where that word is and how many times it is used, or look for a whole phrase or quote such as, “Why don't we try injecting ourselves with detergent?”
The ctrl + F key will take you to the first instance of that word with no messing. It is also great for work purposes for finding and replacing something that is incorrect and repeated throughout a document.
Say, for example, you write an article and realise that the Mr Johnson you have been referring to around a hundred times is actually called Mr Johnston with a T, like in the Netflix series The Gentlemen. Or it could be something simple like a corporate name or software such as MedTech that needs to be hyphenated Med-Tech.
Normally, you would have to laboriously go through everything you wrote, find all the errors and go about clicking and putting hyphens or T's everywhere they were needed.
Ctrl + Shift + T
Another brilliant but lesser-known function is the Restore Last Tab key. This is ideal for when you have accidentally closed down a tab or even a full window of different websites you had open.
Pressing Ctrl + Shift + T restores each tab in turn, so you can press it sequentially and open up all the work or web pages you had loaded, without needing to go back in and search for the page again.
Windows Key + Cursor Key (up, down, left, right)
This is a handy function that is not commonly used but will organise the open windows on your screen for you.
For example, pressing the Windows Key and Right cursor key (arrow pointing to the right) will shunt the currently open window to the right side of the screen and automatically resize it to fit into 50% of the screen.
This is ideal when you have two or more windows open and need them to be both active and used at the same time, for example, with an open Word document and a website that is being used for research or source material.
With the Windows key + cursor key, you can arrange your on-screen windows perfectly without needing to draw a box around everything and trying to get the windows to snap into place where you want them.
Windows Key + Number (1–9)
Another useful although less frequently used option is the Windows key plus any number that is used to select the appropriate app in the taskbar based on its position in the list.
So, Windows key + 1 will select the first app on your taskbar, 2 will select the second, etc.
Sometimes, you need to constantly switch back and forth between two programs, and finding the little tab at the top every time can be finicky, depending on what app you have open, especially if it's in full-screen mode.
With this handy shortcut, you can jump straight to the program you want to use without needing to close any windows and hunt for the open application.
Contact Lyon
For more tips on how to speed up your working processes and refine your operations, at Lyon, we provide businesses with all the tools, technology, and information they need to stay ahead of the game.
So, get in touch with our friendly advisors today and we can discuss which approach would be most suitable for your business.
