Windows Keyboard Shortcuts

Windows Keyboard Shortcuts

Welcome to my first blog post on our new website. This will be a place where you can comment on the info we post up here, you can expect to see information about computers and technology in general. We will try to keep you informed on new innovations we stumble across in our wanderings on the web as we do spend quite a bit of time there :). We will be posting a lot of information about Windows because we spend the vast majority of our time supporting Windows systems.
windows keyboard shortcuts
So to kick things off I’m going to go through the very basics of shortcuts that you should be using every day on your keyboard that all told will save you a heap of time. Let’s just dive right in to it – if you are like me you will do a lot of copying and pasting data from one thing to another, for those interested that information goes from where you paste it onto something called the clipboard, that is where that data goes before you paste it into whatever you are working on. First you have to select the text, you can mouse it by holding Left Click and swiping over what you want to copy or if I have paragraphs of text then you can do this – press Home to take you to the start of the paragraph then hold down Shift and press the End key if you want more than one line press the Down Arrow and keep going till you get what you want, you can also use the Page Down Key or Up Arrow and Page Up if you want to go the other way. Once you have selected what you want to copy just press CTRL+C to copy then go to where you want to paste the data and hit CTRL+V to paste it in. If you are using an application like Excel and want to shift existing data down it will give you the option to do that. If you want to cut the text out of the document and move it somewhere else then use Cut which is CTRL+X. If you want to undo what you have just done use CTRL+Z and if you need to redo what you just undid use CTRL+Y. You aren’t going to remember all of them and to save you coming back and reading this I’m making a quick list in this post too. Go try them out if you didn’t know these ones. I’ll give you some you probably didn’t know next.

I know that stuff you say, ok cool, we will move onto some that I use which I reckon are pretty cool, first up, how many of you use the Windows Key at all? What Windows Key is what most people say, it’s been on your keyboards for ages but most people don’t use it. Let’s say you have a whole screeen full of Windows open but you know that you have a shortcut to something on your desktop, hit the Windows Key + D. the Windows key looks like the logo on this page and is on the left of the spacebar. How about you have so many windows open you are just not sure which one need to get to, you can always use the old Alt + Tab and go through them or if you have the new schmick Windows 7 you can go Windows Key + TAB, this is pretty cool, it’s called Aero and it will show you in a nice graphical format what is open, you can keep pressing it to scroll through or if you have a mouse with a wheel just scroll your wheel to go back and forth to find what you were looking for.

Ever opened a picture and it’s not the right way round? Hit CTRL+. (fullstop) and it will rotate clockwise, you want to go the other way use CTRL+, (comma). If you need to select all the files in a Windows Explorer window so you can copy them all or delete them all use the CTRL+A key and it does that and if you like to use your mouse then try hold down Shift and Left Click the first file then scroll down and hold Shift and Left Click the last file to get them all or you can just grab a few like this. If you want select files in the list just hold down CTRL while you Left Click and keep holding CTRL while you click on each file you want then you can CTRL+C to copy them and CTRL+V to paste them somewhere else.

I’m going to list all my shortcuts right here in bullet point as well so you can quickly access them in case you forget them.

Copy – CTRL+C
Paste – CTRL+V
Cut – CTRL+X
Undo – CTRL+Z
Redo – CTRL+Y
Minimise all – Windows Key + D
Find a Window – Windows Key + Tab
Rotate a picture clockwise – CTRL+.
Rotate a picture anti-clockwise – CTRL+,
Select All – CTRL+A

That is about all I have time for right now so I hope that you bookmark this page and keep coming back in case you forget one of the shortcuts. I will keep the articles coming and you can comment on our blog right now. We will get the answers to any questions back up here as quickly as possible.

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