When a customer has trouble printing on one of our computers, I will go over and use the CTRL+P command to get the computer to print for them. Often the customer is surprised as they did not know that command. In fact there are lots of control key shortcuts that can be used to do many functions quickly and easily in both windows and excel.

Some functions such as CTRL+P work in both environments while others don’t, for example CTRL+Del for windows and excel and CTRL+H for excel only equals delete.

For me one of the most important shortcuts is undo which is CTRL+Z , as I tend to cut material then think better of it. As long as you haven’t saved your work you can use CTRL-Z.

CTRL+C equals copy for both while CTRL+V equals paste for both word and excel.  Depending on what you want to copy using CTRL+A is a good option as all will be selected, then it is easy to use  CTRL+C and then CTRL+V to move the information to another area or page. You can also move to another document using the above commands, even between different programs like word and excel.

When I am looking for information on a page I like to use CTRL+F which will highlight the word I am searching for in the text of my document, or not if it is not there.  This helps when I am looking for information and just want to see what is said about my word for example­­­­­­ I was looking into state statutes and wanted to find what they had on the ADA, I tried ADA and Americans with disabilities act and disabilities as I was unsure of what term was used. It was quick and easy to try other words or phrases because CTRL+F did the looking for me.

CTRL+F does not work as well as for some materials, for example old newspapers online. Because of the quality or lack thereof for many papers I still use the quick look, but will also scan the papers if nothing comes up and I expect that it should.

Other shortcuts of interest:

CTRL+N                    create a new document.
CTRL+O                    open a document.
CTRL+W                  close a document.
CRTL+S                     save a document.
ALT+CTRL+I           print preview a document.
CTRL+HOME          go to the top of the document.

There are many short cuts you can use, I have only talked about a few, to find out about more of them go to https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Keyboard-shortcuts-for-Microsoft-Word-2016-for-Windows-95ef89dd-7142-4b50-afb2-f762f663ceb2

For Windows 10 go to http://blogs.technet.com/b/sebastianklenk/archive/2015/05/28/windeos-10-keyboard-shortcuts-at-a-glance.aspx  go to page two down toward the bottom to find the article.