Short Cut Keys – Easier than the clicking.

I used to be a power user! In the old days of Lotus 123 and WordPerfect 5.1 and DOS 6.22, I could do just about anything with blazing speed. I knew all the Lotus commands by heart and WordPerfect’s F keys were second nature.

Then I got lazy. Windows came, as did Excel and Word and the mouse became my crutch. I didn’t need to know what the commands were, because they were always available with the click of a mouse.

I am no longer a power user. I am like the two finger hunt and peck typist when it comes to performing most functions. I can click with the best of them, though. I have even mastered the touch pad on my laptop.

I have lost a lot of productivity since my power user days. It seems that it takes me a lot longer to create and edit a document. Taking my fingers off the keyboard and moving the mouse is not really very effective.

I met a woman the other day who had just finished up her degree in graphic design at a local college. We chatted a bit about the programs she used and about some of the courses she took. The one comment that stuck with me was about using the short cut keys built into every program.

She talked about one of her instructors who taught the class to ignore the mouse and use the keyboard for just about everything. I hadn’t given it much thought, though I did think about the pre Windows days when we didn’t have a mouse.

When I started writing these blog entries, I decided to see if I could return to my power user glory days. Could I get by without the mouse?

In the beginning, I couldn’t work without the mouse. I had to use the mouse to drop down the command menus to see what the keystrokes were. In addition only a few of the basic functions in Word have keystrokes attached to them. It is possible though to create your own keystrokes for just about any function.

The keystrokes I have learned to use are:

Ctrl-O to open a new document
Ctrl-S to save the document
Ctrl-A to select the entire document
Ctrl-C to copy the selection I just made

I create these posts in Word, with the spelling and grammar checkers running. I copy and paste them into the blog program. I use Ctrl-V to paste the selection I copied from Word.

Try some keystrokes from one of your favorite program and see if you can save yourself some time.

Let me know what you think,

Marc