Monday, September 26, 2005

All Those Shortcuts
A good number of my posts are for shortcut keys when using Windows and Office products. You can find a complete list of all their shortcuts on the Microsoft site at: http://www.microsoft.com/enable/products/keyboard.aspx. And of course you can always use the Help index of a Microsoft product. In Help, type "keyboard shortcuts" in the Answer Wizard or Index boxes. You will be returned a list of keyboard shortcuts for that application.
Title Bar Shortcut Menu
One little known way to close a window is to double-click the title bar icon located at the far left of the title bar. Alt+Spacebar opens the title bar shortcut menu (this was referred to as the control program box in Win3.1). The default option is Close which is why the double-click works. Other options allow you to manipulate the screen without using a mouse. This is helpful when the window is off screen or the mouse stops working. To open this menu without the mouse, click Alt+spacebar.

Friday, September 23, 2005

Scrolling
The vertical scroll bar in Internet Explorer allows us to move a window up and down to see more of a web page. As you know, clicking the top arrow moves the page up; the down arrow moves it down. A quick way to scroll through the page is to grab the scroll bar by mousing over the bar located between the arrows, then hold down the left mouse button and drag up or down. Often this method is too quick.

A better approach is to click in the white space between the scroll bar and one of the arrows; top to scroll up and bottom to scroll down. This results in a scroll of one screen worth of data at a time. There is a shortcut for this method -- simply press the spacebar on the keyboard.

Thursday, September 22, 2005

A Typing Test
Ever wonder how well you type. Here is a simple typing test you can take online to see what your speed and error rate is. Try it out; it only takes a minute or two. http://www.typingpal.com/test/