I can remember thinking back in high school how useless it was to learn all of the “countless” hot key combinations in Windows. I stuck with this mindset for several years but eventually “came around” and started using them myself. So today, I will tell you about the top 7 hot keys that I use the most often. I’m sure most of you are familiar with these as they are some of the more common hot keys, but for those of you who aren’t…
1. Ctrl+C — Copy. Much faster than right-clicking, and selecting Copy.
2. Ctrl+X — Cut. Again, another time-saving hot key.
3. Ctrl+V — Paste. Once you have something on the clipboard, well… you gotta paste it somewhere!
4. Alt+Tab — Task Switcher. Lets you pan through all of the open windows, programs, etc. that are open and select the one you want as the active window.
5. Ctrl+T — Open a new tab in Firefox. Keith showed me this hot key a few days ago and I love it. So much easier than opening a new browser window.
6. Alt+F4 — Closes the current page. This used to be a life saver when pop-up windows were a problem, but I don’t use it quite as much as I used to. Still useful to close a bunch of windows very quickly.
7. F5 — Refreshes current page. Yet another hot key that I don’t use as much as I used to. I have the thumb-button on my G7 mouse set as the refresh page button… but when I am not at my computer, I always use F5 to refresh.
