I had a wonderful discussion this morning with a teacher who commented that she couldn’t view an entire video on the Fallbrook Tech Coach website, that her screen cut off part of the video. I visited her classroom and found that the problem was an adjustment of her monitor view that could be altered with a keyboard shortcut. The problem: her monitor was “zoomed in” and she often had to scroll over to see the entire screen, for example, to log out of ABI. The solution? The Control key and the Minus key. CTRL – is a shortcut that works when you are not typing in a text area to zoom out. The Control key and the Plus key work to zoom in (when you are not typing in a text area). We “zoomed out” by holding the Control key and pressing minus (each time you press minus, you’ll zoom out incrementally).
This got me to thinking about the value of keyboard shortcuts. Here are a few of the efficiency-boosting keyboard shortcuts that work in Windows programs like Word, PowerPoint and Excel. The picture below is a link to the Microsoft article on more keyboard shortcuts. Two that are worth mentioning here because they are so useful are the CTRL-Z (undo) and CTRL-A (select all) keyboard shortcuts. Practice with these a few times and you’ll be getting more work done in a shorter time.