Back in June, I wrote about the wonders of Control-F and how you can use this keyboard shortcut to find text in almost everything you would do on a computer (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, web pages, WordPress back-end, etc., etc., etc). This post tells you about the other Control- or Ctrl+ keyboard shortcuts that you can use to …
- save your mouse hand
- do things quickly
- impress your friends (maybe – depends what kind of friends you have …)
What keyboard shortcuts does the Control Key give you?
I’m going to categorise these into different areas for you. For each shortcut, you will typically need to highlight the text that you want to change if you’re doing something like changing its style or copying or cutting it, and pop the cursor in the right place if you want to paste. I’ll tell you what you need to do by each one. For each one, you need to press the Control key, usually marked Ctrl (and you might have more than on on your keyboard) then keep it pressed down while you press the second key on the keyboard).
Keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting:
Ctrl-C – COPY Highlight the text you want to copy (leaving it where it is but making a copy you can paste elsewhere) and hit Control + c
Ctrl-X – CUT Highlight the text you want to cut out of your text (and maybe paste elsewhere) and hit Control + x
Ctrl-V – PASTE – pop the cursor where you want the text you’ve cut or copied to appear and hit Control + v
Ctrl-A – HIGHLIGHT ALL – if you want to highlight all of your text in Word, Excel, etc., you can use Control + a to do so
Bonus shortcut: if you want to switch between ALL CAPITALS, Title Capitals and Sentence capitals on a section of text, Shft-F3 is your friend. More detail here.
Keyboard shortcuts for bold, italics and underline
In each case, highlight the text you want to change, and press these keys:
Ctrl-B – to turn non-bold text into bold OR take the emboldening off a section of text, press Control + b
Ctrl-I – to turn non-italic text into italics OR take the italicisation off a section of text, press Control + i
Ctrl-U – to underline text OR take underlining away from a section of text, press Control + u
Keyboard shortcuts for Find, Goto and Replace
Ctrl-F – almost everywhere, pressing Control + f will open up a window to allow you to find a string of text (see this article for more detail)
Ctrl-H – in any document where you can replace text (i.e. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.), pressing Control + h will open up the find and replace window which allows you to change a particular string of text into another particular string of text (I will be writing about this in more detail soon)
Ctrl-G – in documents with pages, pressing Control + g will allow you to navigate to a particular page
Keyboard shortcuts for undoing and redoing
Ctrl-Z – UNDO – if you want to undo what you’ve just done, hitting Control-Z has the same effect as hitting that little backwards arrow in your toolbar. It also works if you typed in a URL and the page is taking ages to load – Control-Z will cancel the operation
Ctrl-Y – REDO – lots of people know about Ctrl-Z, but did you know that you can redo an operation that you’ve undone by hitting Control-Y?
Keyboard shortcuts for open / new / print / save
Ctrl-N – if you want to open a new document in Word, Excel, etc., or a new browser window, pressing Control + n will do that for you
Ctrl-O – To open a document, wherever you are on your computer, pressing Control + o will open Windows Explorer so you can find and open your document
Ctrl-S – To open up Windows Explorer and save your document, pressing Control + s will save you clicking with your mouse
Ctrl-P – Want to print? Open up a printer dialogue box using Control + p
Go on – admit it: did you really know ALL of these shortcuts? They’ll save you a few mouse clicks and I find some to be a lot quicker and more useful than the other methods you can use to get the same results. Which are your favourite keyboard shortcuts?
Related posts on this blog:
Find all of the short cuts here …