Keyboard Shortcuts

By Trevor Frew

Do your body a favour, take your main hand away from your mouse, and use keyboard shortcuts to select items from the current open window, copy and paste to the keyboard buffer.

Resting one’s hand on the mouse pad can often block the blood flow in the wrist, and your hand might well become somewhat numb, like mine did. I received surgery from a neurosurgeon for carpal tunnel syndrome.

Mind you, I’ve been using a keyboard since age 15 when I began my apprenticeship as a commercial machine typographer in the printing trade. What's that, you ask? A glorified typist who uses a Monotype, Linotype or Intertype machine. If you're interested, use Google to scan for Linotype machine.


CTL-A: Highlight all in the current open window.
CTL-B: Make text bold.
CTL-C: Copy to keyboard buffer.
CTL-I: Make text italic.
CTL-V: Paste from your keyboard buffer to the position of the cursor in the window.
CTL-HOME: Moves the cursor to the beginning of the current window.
CTL-ENTER: Inserts Page Break in the current document.

And the most important of them all: CTL-S, to save the current file

SHIFT-ENTER: Insert new line. Note that this is different from the carriage return character which inserts a carriage return AND line feed.

Note that in Microsoft Office the Carriage Return has font, format (italic, bold), and justification information. Pasting from the keyboard buffer to the current document, whether it’s Word, Excel, Access, or Power Point.

In my opinion Windows XP Home comes with the best font for text: Palatino Linotype. It’s much clearer to read than the boring old Times New Roman. It’s much easier to distinguish between upper case and lowercase I, lowercase l, figure 1 and vertical bar. Zero, upper and lowercase o are much easier to spot, too.

Oddly, this information doesn’t always carry over to Microsoft FrontPage.

For further information press F1 for Help. Also, investigate the language settings in Control Panel.

Speaking of health, it's a really good idea to get up and walk around to exercise one's body.


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