In our previous blog, we looked at some of the best shortcuts for you to know in your day-to-day work. In this second blog, we will look in a bit more detail at some of these shortcuts, particularly the depth of things you can do with some of these commands, many of which can be incredibly useful.
Undo
One of the commands we looked at in the last blog was Undo (Ctrl + Z). As implied by the name, this shortcut will take you back an action (Ctrl + Z). However, the shortcut has quite a bit more functions.
You probably know that that you can usually use undo multiple times, quite a few times. But there is also a button that looks like something like this -
If you click on this button, it will bring up a box taking you through all of the recent actions you’ve taken, allowing you to specifically choose where to undo to. Pretty handy right?
The power of pasting
Another of the shortcuts, and one of the most well-known ones out there, is Paste (Ctrl + V), which pastes the content you have selected with Copy or Cut. However, there is a lot more depth in what can be done with the Paste function.
So, if you are in Word, you should see ‘Paste’ towards the top left of the screen. You’ll need to be in the ‘Home’ tab, so check this if you can’t see the paste option. If you have some content that you’ve copied or cut, selecting the down arrow under ‘Paste’ will give you a lot of options for how to paste the information in.
Particularly helpful can be the options around how the information to be pasted is formatted. Usually, you can choose to keep the formatting from where the information came from, merge the formatting with the new document or paste as text only. If you’ve ever pasted information from different places, you’ve probably run into the issue of messing up the formatting of the document you are working on. These options can help reduce some of those headaches and can be a great option for pasting information across apps (particularly from something like Excel into Word or Outlook), where funky formatting glitches can take ages to sort out.
Ctrl + Shift + Esc
Going from one of the best-known shortcuts to one that many people may not know. You will almost certainly know about, and used, Ctrl + Alt + Del many, many times. But you will also likely have noticed that, rather than bringing up the Task Manager function to work out what’s crashed straight away, that command now takes you to a sort of overview screen where you can choose to open Task Manager, but where you can also choose to Lock the computer, Switch User or Log Off.
Whilst it’s not a massive issue all things considered; it’s a bit annoying to have to click through another screen to get to Task Manager. However, the remedy for this is Ctrl + Shift + Esc. This will immediately open Task Manage, without going through the additional screen that Ctrl + Alt +Del opens.
Newer versions of Windows have introduced a number of functions for Task Manager that were not available in earlier versions. This Microsoft article is a great resource to use for understanding how you can use Task Manager to diagnose potential issues with your computer.
Browser v Desktop
The final point for today is that quite a few of these commands only work in the desktop version of Windows apps. If you don’t know what the difference is, the browser version of apps works, as you might expect, through internet browsers such as Chrome or Edge. The desktop version is the stand-alone app, that will have its own icon.
Generally, the desktop version of apps will have more functions and allow you to do more than browser versions will. Thinking about this blog, it is particularly true for pasting, where the additional functionality we’ve looked at is only available in the desktop version of apps. If you are in the browser version, you can switch to desktop by clicking on ‘Editing’ (in the top right) and selecting ‘Open in Desktop’. As we set out in our blog Leveraging Microsoft Business Standard Licence for your Business,
Contact us
Hopefully, this has been helpful and shown you at least a couple of new shortcuts that you can start using. As always, if you have an IT-related issue, or want to discuss what IT solutions could help your business, check out the services we can offer you on our Services page and drop us a line at contact@mckeownscullin.com.
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