Using your mouse takes too much time and lowers your productivity. Our IT Guru and productivity master will literally save you minutes each day. And these five keyboard shortcuts will buy back an entire week of time over 1 year. If you are using your mouse to switch between programs, deploy functions, find and replace, take screen shots and alter text, STOP it now there is an easier way.
Video:
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Podcast:
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Video Transcript:
Hi. Craig Lambie here, the Chief IT Guru here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. I’m bringing you this week’s Hot Tip Tuesday. This week I’m giving you the top 5 keyboard shortcuts that are going to save you time and increase your productivity so that you can spend less time on the computer and more time in the studio or rehearsing.
First of all some of you use Macs and some you PCs. More Macs so I’m going to talk about that more. On this side you’ll see the Mac shortcuts and on this side you’ll see the PC shortcuts appear as I talk about them.
The first one that I’m going to talk about is switching between programs. This is one of the most important shortcuts that you should learn and it’s going to save you heaps of time. On a Mac we press Command+Tab. That will just switch between programs. There’s an extra one that a lot of people don’t know which is to press command and the tilde key which is just the key above the Tab. What that does is it switches between windows within a program. If you’ve got two workbooks open in Excel or two documents open in Word you can switch between them just by pressing Command+Tilde. It’s that key above the tab key. The equivalent on a PC is Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Tab is that command Tilde.
Now for some basic functions. We all like to copy and paste. First thing is Command+C for copy and Command+V for paste. In a PC world you just swap Command for Ctrl. Cut is a useful one as well if you want to remove something and put it somewhere else. Command+X does cut and it’s Ctrl+X for a PC. Another useful tip is selecting everything in a document. That is really handy. Press Command+A to select all.
Something you’ll use in word processing and things like this is fine. You should use this as often as possible especially if you’re in a browser window and you’re looking for something in a page. Instead of scrolling and looking and looking let the computer do the hard work for you. Press Command+F in a browser, in Word, in PowerPoint, any sort of program and you will find the ‘Find’ function will open. Type what you want in and it will find it straightaway for you. It’s fantastic. Another useful one for word processing in particular is find and replace which is Command+H and swap out Ctrl for the PC.
Here is a Mac only one is you often want to forward delete rather than back delete when you press the delete key. When you press Fn+Del key then you’ll actually forward delete. That is a really handy one. Windows just has a key for that.
A couple of Windows only ones. The Windows key is a really useful one to get down into the menu. If you want to go and search you press the Windows key and start typing. Whereas in a mac you press Command+Space to open the little spotlight function up near the clock. You can start typing anything at all and it will search for that. If you need to open an application quickly press Command+Space, the first few letters to the application and enter will open that application quickly and easily for you. A couple of Windows only ones you can press the Windows Key+M to go straight back to the desktop. I love that one and I really miss when I’m on a Mac.
The next one I want to talk about is screenshots. These are fantastic and you really need to learn these. No matter what computer you’re on you’re going to run into an error or a problem at some point in time. You need to report that to one of us. IT guys love it when you send us a screenshot of that error because we can search for that error and find the solution much faster if you tell us exactly what it said.
The way to do that on a Mac is to press Commad+Shift+3 to get the whole screen or Command+Shift+4 to get just part of the screen. That’s all you need that area that you’re in. On a Windows machine you just simply press PrtSc on the keyboard and press it into paint.
The fifth and final one is the word processing only shortcuts. These are really handy and they work in email. They work in word documents on your word processor across most programs. Bold, press Command+B. If you want to turn bold off again just press it again. It’s simple. Italic Command+I, underline Command+U. These are really simple ones and I’m sure you’re using them all the time so get onto to those shortcuts. That’s this week’s tip. I hope you enjoyed it. I know it’s a bit longer than usual.
If you think that this tip was really useful then please like this video. If you think somebody else can get a load of benefit out of these shortcuts then please share this video on to them. Any comments or questions write them below and actually write below what your favorite keyboard shortcut is so that I can see which ones are being used the most. I’d love to know.
Here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator we don’t want to just survive as an artist we want you to thrive. In order to thrive you need to subscribe. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel and I’ll see you next time.