Tip #1 Time Savers

Every program has several different ways to do the same thing. Most of us use the mouse to point and click to do what we need to do. We have made a habit of taking our fingers off the keyboard and moving over to the mouse to do what we need to do.

One of the biggest selling points of the original Windows operating system was that all of the programs that run under windows would have a common user interface, so that if we learned how to use one program, we would be able to do the basic functions, print, open a file, save a file, copy and paste, and even get help.

How many of you remember the days before Windows? How did we do things? We did keystrokes. As we used our favorite programs, we were able to do the keystrokes without even thinking about it. I was a big fan of Lotus 123 and Wordperfect 5.1. I still have these programs loaded on my computer and I still can perform some of the basic functions such as printing and saving files without thinking about the keystrokes involved.

I recently met a young women who had just finished a degree in graphic arts at a local college. As we talked about her courses, she mentioned that one of her instructors demanded that they learn to use keystrokes instead of the mouse when the worked on their projects. She indicated that as she learned to use the keystrokes, her productivity increased significantly.

I decide that it was time to go back and re-learn to use the keystrokes in my programs.

Where do you start, how do you find out what the short cut keys are? It’s very simple! If you look at the command line of your programs, you will see that next to many of the functions that you usually click on are the short cut keys.

Some common short cut keys are:

Ctrl-O to open a file
Ctrl-S to save a file
Ctrl-P to print a file
Ctrl-C to copy
Ctrl-P to paste
Ctrl-X to cut and paste
Ctrl-Z will undo you last action
Ctrl-F will open a find window
With a little bit of practice, you can also learn how to use keystrokes to highlight areas of text.

Let me give you a real world example of how I use there keystrokes to save time. I write a blog entry almost every day. I use blogger, from Google to publish my blog to the Internet. I don’t like the editor that blogger has, so I write my entries in Word and then I cut and paste it to blogger’s editor.

The keystrokes I use are Ctrl-A to select the entire entry, and then Ctrl-C to copy the selection. Then I use alt-tab to switch from word to the web page with the editor on it. I then use Ctrl-V to paste the entry into the editor. I use the cursor arrows to position my cursor at the top line of the copied text, this is my blog entry title. I then use Shift-Right Arrow-End to highlight the entire line, and then I use Ctrl-X to cut the line and I cursor to the Title Box and then hit Ctrl-V to paste the title.