The Best Keyboard Shortcuts To Use On Windows

Keyboard shortcuts not only save us lots of time and unsaved work but also aid people with physical difficulties preventing them from using a mouse.

And the following are the best shortcuts to use in Windows operating system.

Ctrl-Z

It’s inevitable that we will make mistakes while typing a document or working on files, so you should remember we have the undo command “Ctrl-Z”. You cannot apply this command every time you do wrong but it’s powerful enough to be worth a shot.

If you delete a paragraph by accident, just press Ctrl-Z and it will be restored. Of when you delete some files/folders by accident, the keyboard shortcut will bring them back from the recycle bin. However, if you press Shift-Del to delete anything, Ctrl-Z won’t work anymore.

You may also want to note the redo shortcut, Ctrl-Y, allowing you to undo an undo.

Select, copy, cut, paste and more

These are the most well-known keyboard shortcuts. You can copy almost whatever you want with Ctrl-C and paste it in the space you need with Ctrl-V.

If you to give a command to everything, press Ctrl-A. If you want to move something to cut or delete something, press Ctrl-X.

Microsoft Office’s probably most useful shortcut is Ctrl-Alt-V that lets you choose how to paste something you’ve just copied. You can select among text in HTML, RTF, or Unicode formats, or unformatted text.

Plus, pressing Ctrl-I makes texts italic, Ctrl-U means underlining texts, and Ctrl-B gives you bold texts.

Ribbon shortcuts

First introduced in Microsoft Office 2007, the Ribbon user interface developed by Jensen Harris has been a handy feature for mouse users. Since then, other programs have adopted this feature too, like Microsoft Paint and File Explorer. There were concerns that people that cannot use a mouse will not benefit from this feature, but that’s not true.

In case you are not familiar with the shortcuts for a ribbon, press Alt. For instance, press Alt-H if you want to expand Home in Microsoft Office. You’ll see a section dropping down, including all keys for different graphical options.

Windows key tricks

On Microsoft’s keyboard, there is a key with Microsoft logo on it, which is frequently used in Windows 10 for keyboard shortcuts.

Among them, the best one would be WinKey-X that direct you to power options, Task Manager, disk management and shut down.

Pressing Alt-Tab will let you see what applications are running.

Pressing WinKey-Tab will display the Task View timeline. Here you can view your applications thumbnails for days. If you see something you were working on, just click on its thumbnail to continue.

In case of a virtual desktop user, you can press WinKey-Ctrl+D you can open a new one. Or you can move between desktops using Winkey-Ctrl plus the right or left arrow keys. To close the present virtual window, press WinKey-Ctrl+F4.

To view programs side-by-side to view the window in just one-fourth of the screen, press WinKey-Left arrow then press Up arrow.

To maximize or minimize a window, press WinKey+Up arrow or WinKey+Down arrow respectively.

When you have programs pinned to the Task Bar, press WinKey+1 to open the first one from left to right, press WinKey+2 to open the second one, etc.

Web keys

Previously, we used to press Ctrl+ to enlarge things, Ctrl- (minus) to make them smaller, or Ctrl-0 (zero) when we want to return them to original sizes. Today, these shortcuts are still handy to make too-small texts easier to read, but you can use the Reader icon which features in almost all browsers.

This icon has replaced the following shortcuts in the menu: Alt-V for View, Alt-Y for Page Style, and Alt-N for No Style.

To move down on a web page, you press the spacebar, while press Shift+Spacebar to move up. The Page Down and Page Up keys do the same things, but they’re less handy since they do not lie across the keyboard like the aforementioned keys.

Instead of the Back key, you can press Alt-Left arrow to return to the previously loaded web page while Alt-Right arrow does the opposite.

Additionally, there are plenty of other keyboard shortcuts for you to use:

Ctrl-T: open a new browser tab

Ctrl-W: close tab

Shift-Ctrl-T: reopen a tab

Ctrl-R: refresh a page (F5 can do the same)

Ctrl-1: switch to the first tab on the browser

Ctrl-2: switch to the second one, etc.