The secret to my "success"

Like most professionals, I balance a lot of competing interests in my workplace - I need to give consideration to efficiency, thoroughness, perfectionism, professionalism, relatability, and more. You could argue about how much success I've actually achieved - after all, I'm typing this alone in a basement in Cleveland for a blog that five people read - but to the extent that I've forged ahead in my day job, efficiency is a major reason. I can just do a lot of things quickly, particularly computer-based tasks (which are most things these days). This, despite a borderline-OCD need to edit some of the documents I handle; I won't analyze an Excel sheet until I've center-aligned the cells vertically, and I simply won't read anything in ALL CAPS until I've turned down the volume with some lower-case letters.

A lot of why I'm able to do things quickly has nothing to do with intelligence or competence of any sort, as regular readers of TFB can attest. Rather, it's simply because I use keyboard shortcuts. Those of you who already do this undoubtedly know how painful it is to watch someone in a meeting or work session abuse their mouse and sap your time just because they can't find the Ctrl button (there are two!) on their keyboard. Those of you who aren't using keyboard shortcuts, well, maybe you'll pick up a few tips here. I'll try to include the shortcuts for both Mac OS and Windows in the headings but will generally use Windows ones in the text.

Alt-Tab (Mac: command-Tab)
For my money, this is by far the most useful keyboard shortcut. Ever. I can't even tell you how many hours this guy must have saved me. It's simple: hit Alt-Tab whenever you want to switch applications. Hold down Alt and press Tab twice and go to the application you viewed two apps ago, and so on through your entire active list. It's tremendously useful when you're toggling between two particular applications, like if you're transferring data between an Excel Workbook and a PowerPoint Presentation. When I see people switching back and forth by moving their cursor over to the taskbar and selecting the application they just left, well, I can almost taste those seconds of my life I'm never getting back.


Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V (command-C and command-V)
At this point, there's no excuse for not knowing how to use these for quickly copying and pasting text. Sorry, everyone, but there is to be no more going up to the "Edit" menu to pick copy and then repeating paste, and we're also not doing the thing where we right-click the selection, choose "Copy", then right-click the destination space and picking "Paste" from the pop-up menu. Find your Ctrl (Command) button and start doing this the quick and easy way. DO IT.


Ctrl-S, Ctrl-W, Ctrl-Q (all command instead of Ctrl for a Mac
Save, close, quit. Easy, easy, easy. Use that "save" key liberally, friends - not only does Ctrl-S save a bit of time each instance of saving, but I've found it puts me in much better habits for frequent saves, which can save big chunks of time if you run into a system instability. Sometimes the window-closing function doesn't work in certain programs - most notably open messages in Outlook - but generally speaking it's solid. Also, on Windows machines, Alt-F4 can usually accomplish anthing Ctrl-Q can.


Ctrl-U, Ctrl-I, Ctrl-B
Ha, no one underlines things anymore. But Bold and Italics are good ones to be able to access readily. By the way, it's interesting to note how much style has changed as computers have become widespread. Remember back when you were in high school, assuming you're as old as me, and titles of movies, TV shows, books, and records were generally underlined? Weird. Italics have replaced those awkward-looking underlines as computer text has gained a greater share of the written word, and I think it's much for the better. I can even write reasonably well in italics these days; to me, that's a skill 100 times better than cursive, which, for the record, is still an utter and complete waste of time.


Ctrl-A (command-A)
Select all. Now that you've read this, I don't want to see you dragging your mouse across huge swaths of text and imagery and running up to find "Copy" in the ribbon, OK? It's tremendously speedy - want to change all the font on a slide or document? Ctrl-A, pick your font, done. What makes this command handy is that it selects all using a relative frame for what constitutes "all" - that is, if you're inside a cell in Excel, a table in Word, a composition window in Blogger, or some other sub-entity, Ctrl-A selects everything within that, not your entire file. Sometimes multiple quick applications of Ctrl-A let you select increasingly large "all"s as well, which is handy.


Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-Y (you guessed it - command for Windows)
Undo and Redo here - of these, I think "Undo" is far better known than its forward-moving counterpart, but both are quite nitfy to keep in one's toolbox. For those of us who make mistakes liberally, Ctrl-Z is über-handy. For those of us who have been trudging our cursors up to the top of the window to grab that little curvy arrow everytime we need to go back a step in time - you're welcome.

Redo doesn't get nearly enough usage, I think, at least in part because people don't know about it. The concept is simple - after you've performed an action, simply move to a new location (or not), hit Ctrl-Y , and whatever action you did will be repeated there. This is great for inserting lines in Excel, changing fonts and sizes in PowerPoint - really any time you need to carry out a single- command repetitively and another shortcut (like Ctrl-B) isn't available. The one drawback is Microsoft's frequent insistence that it "Can't Redo" when I know you can fucking redo, you just won't. Other than that, gold.


Ctrl-F, Ctrl-H
Find and Replace. Super handy. Do yourself a favor next time you have a Word document - select all (Ctrl-A, remember?), equal justify it, and use a Ctrl-H to replace all your double spaces with single ones. This isn't the typewriter era anymore - we don't need to hammer out two spaces between our sentences anymore. The caveat here is that command-H is used to hide an application in Mac OS, so if you need to do a Replace, you have to go through the Find dialogue and select Replace. Not a biggie.


F7
Spell-check. Particularly useful for those of us who have disabled spell-check on all our programs. Trust me, it's awful for someone who spells reasonably well and does a lot of technical writing. Science words just cover the page in red wavy underlines of ignorance.


Ctrl-K
Select the text or object that you want to make clickable (maybe even using a Ctrl-A and/or one of the below tricks), and hit Ctrl-K to turn it into a hyperlink. I've gotten more and more use out of this, sending fewer files and referencing more storage and content locations. You really should stop mailing out those 5 MB documents and bare URL's.


Ctrl-cursor and shift-cursor (Option- and shift- for Mac)
Your cursor can do a lot more than plod along one movement at a time up, down, left, right, and Page Up, Page Down. Using the Ctrl and Shift keys along with the arrow keys gives you a lot more flexibility and functionality in moving around within text or worksheets. Holding Shift as you move along with arrows selects text as you go in Word, Outlook, and within Excel cells, and also selects multiple Excel cells as you move about with the key held down. This is somewhat useful, but in conjunction with speedy Ctrl-arrow movements, can really save a lot of time. Ctrl- is the warp of keyboard shortcuts - instead of pushing left 31 times to get from "of" to keyboard in this sentence, I could have held down Ctrl and done it in just 5 arrow keystrokes, as Ctrl-left or Ctrl-right takes you to the beginning or end of the next word. Very handy. In Excel Ctrl- movement takes you to the beginning or end of a row (or column) of data. This is especially powerful when used in conjunction with Shift, as you can quickly highlight sentences and word groups without resorting to the mouse. If I want to delete the word "periodiclaly" because of that typo I made, I can either push backspace 12 times...or I can hit Ctrl-Shift-Arrow once, delete, and get back to work. This is exceedingly useful for volume guessing in Sporcle, as well. On a Mac, command-arrow takes you to the very beginning or end of an entire line; I'm not sure that this has an analog on a Windows machine.


Ctrl-dragging and shift-dragging
I can't overstate how useful those same two keys (and, again, option- and shift- for Macs) are for drawing in PowerPoint, Word, Visio, or other applications. Anytime you drag in a drawing program, whether drawing a line, moving an object, creating a shape, whatever, holding down Shift keeps everything Cartesian; objects move and are created straight right/left or up/down, keep their vertical or horizontal alignment, or are created as regular objects (circles and polygons). Very helpful. Ctrl- is arguably even better. Have you ever watched a friend or colleague struggle to duplicate shapes - right clicking, copying, pasting to a new spot, then adjusting the inevitably bad placing of the new object? I know you have. When holding down Ctrl, you just grab your object, move to a new location (in conjunction with Shift, if you like!), and a perfect copy appears at the new spot, preserving the original in the process. Ctrl- also adds symmetry to sizing operations - if you lengthen a line in one direction or widen a square, Ctrl- makes sure the same adjustment is applied over on the other side of the object. Pretty cool.


None of these are particularly advanced - they're just handy little conveniences that are simple to learn and master and can save you hours and hours of time wrangling with productivity software that could be much better spent at home or at work. Rock on,