Tuesday Quick Tips: Alt Key…
Over the past couple of weeks of posting my Tuesday Quick Tips, I’ve actually be learning a ton of stuff. I would encourage you to head back to the past postings and check out the comments for each. A couple of weeks back, my buddy Eddie pointed out that the middle-click tip was perfect for closing non-focused Internet Explorer tabs since they don’t have a little x on them to close them. Excellent tip and one that never crossed my mind.
The tip for tonight is the use of the Alt key. You may have noticed little underlined letters in the menu bar of your programs. In Firefox, it looks something like this:
If you hold down the Alt key and then press the ‘T’ key, you will notice the Tool menu opens. Once that menu is opened, you will notice even more menu items with underlines. ‘D’ for Download, ‘S’ for Google Search, ‘O’ for Options, etc. By continuing to hold down Alt, you can keep pressing the letter key corresponding with the shortcut. Clicking Tools, then options with your mouse requires navigating a mouse and clicking.
These types of navigational maneuvers with a mouse might seem like they are fairly simple, but most tasks performed with a mouse are much slower than their keyboard counterparts. Check this non-scientific study that I did on the use of the Ctrl key in copying and pasting information.
As an added bonus, if you use the ribbon located in Microsoft Office 2007, holding down the Alt key shows an overlay of shortcuts for all the commands you could ever need.
What do you use your Alt key for? Are you a keyboard short-cutter or a mouse-only type? Let me know in the comments.
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