What’s with this CTRL key then? II

25/04/2009 by Bertha.

As promised here are a few more keyboard shortcuts to make life a bit easier.

We all know the feeling, you’ve been surfing the net, answering E-mails and listening to music so there’s more than a few Windows open and now you need to find a shortcut on the desktop. Either you minimise each window in turn or use Win key+D. What’s the “Win” key when it’s home you ask? Its that one between the Ctrl and the Alt key down at the bottom left of the keyboard.

 While on about the Win key press Win key+Tab when you have a number of windows open and you can scroll through all the windows to see what each one is. Very useful if, like me, you often have a lot of windows on the go at any one time!

Fancy another Win key? Try the Win key all on its own. Yes, you guessed, it does the same as clicking on Start on the screen! Press it again and the window will go away.

The next one isn’t exactly a shortcut but it does save time. You know how it is when you pop a CD or DVD into the drive on your computer and Windows starts doing whatever with it straight away whether you want to or not? Fine most of the time, but what if you want to control what’s happening? Easy, hold the Shift(upper case or capitals) key down as you closed the draw of the drive and wait until the light has finished flashing.

Ever wanted to send more than one photo of little Johnny to Grandma? Ever wanted to do it without selecting each photo one at a time? Select the first photo (or any file be it music, pictures or whatever) then hold down the Ctrlkey and select all the other files you need to. Hey presto, all the files are selected at once and you just have to carry on as usual.

This one is something that has saved me plenty of time. There you are busily writing away and suddenly you look up and eVERYTHING is the wrong way round - yes you’ve pressed the Caps Lock key by mistake!!! No problem. Highlight the offending text (hold Shift while using the arrows) and then hold Shift while pressing F3. The text will scroll through a combination of all lowercase, all uppercase and first letter uppercase - problem solved!

Now, all these might not work as described, some might not even work at all. XP and Vista do work differently from one another at times. It even makes a difference which program is open when you try the shortcuts! Sometimes it’s just trial and error. However, for those of you who are interested, a full list of XP shortcuts can be found HERE with a list for Vista HERE.

Happy shortcutting.

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