Tuesday Quick Tip: The Ctrl Key…

If you are in the mood to get things done, you need all the short-cuts you can get. A number of my favorite short-cuts involve the Ctrl key.

Since most people use a mouse, they don’t see much use for the Ctrl, Alt, and other non-letter/non-numeric keys on their keyboard. However you can save yourself a significant amount of time, especially if you use your browser, Microsoft Word, or Microsoft Excel on a regular basis.

Example: Copying and pasting text via mouse

1. Select the text.
2. Right click on the selection.
3. Click ‘Copy’.
4. Click your destination.
5. Right click.
6. Click ‘Paste’.

Alright, six steps totaling approximately 10 seconds, because remember, you have to select exactly the text you want to copy, you have to aim your shaky mouse hand at the little ‘Copy’ and ‘Paste’ buttons, and you still have to get from one location in the page to another.

With the shortcuts Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, you can cut it down to 4 steps AND you will get rid of the errors made by shaky mouse hands.

Example: Copying and pasting text via keyboard

1. Select the text.
2. Hold Ctrl with your pinky and use your index finger to tap the C key.
3. Click your destination.
4. Hold Ctrl with your pinky and use your index finger to tap the V key.

Now you’ve used 4 steps that took approximately 5 seconds.

Saving those 5 seconds my not seem like much, but if you were to be instructed to copy and paste 100 items during a work day (probably not a stretch if you use Word or Excel much), you will end up saving 500 seconds, or 8 minutes.

If you add other keyboard short-cuts like holding the Alt key and tapping the Tab button to switch between windows or hold the Ctrl key and tapping the left and right arrow keys to select text, you could probably turn that 8 minutes into 30 minutes.

Programs like Gmail are a short-cutter’s paradise with keystrokes that will open the next message, compose a message, or open a reply.

Here is a nifty list of 100 popular short-cut keys for Windows.

What would you do with your 8 minutes? Sleep in? Read a chapter from a book? Daydream about a vacation to a warm part of the world? Let me know in the comments.

Also, if you have any favorite short-cut keys of your own, share those as well.

• Tuesday Quick Tips: Alt Key…
• Tuesday Quick Tips: Middle Click…
• TQT: Queue YouTube to a Specific Time…
• TQT: iPod charging…
• Tuesday Quick Tip: Delete Autofills…