Hints from Jill Duffy at PC Magazine.rtf

I have to send a shout-out to Jill Duffy’s column in PC Magazine.com called Get Organized. She has lots of good tips for organizing both Macs and Windows. Since a lot of us live in blended computer households, I advise you to regularly check Jill’s column out.

If you don’t see it at the site, just enter Get Organized and you’ll see a listing of past and present columns.

The first one to bring to your attention is the one on Keyboard Shortcuts. She lists 25 for Windows and 25 for Mac.

Borrowing from Jill, here are the 25 most essential Mac shortcut keys:

Commonly Used OS-Level Shortcuts

1. Command + Tab (toggle between programs)

2. Command + M (minimize active window)

3. Swipe three fingers up on trackpad (show all active windows)

4. Command + Shift + 3 (take screen shot; the default settings will save it to a predefined location, usually the "Pictures" folder and name it "Picture1," "Picture2," etc.)

5. Command + N (opens new Finder from desktop; new window/file in most other programs)

Browser Shortcuts

6. Command + T (open a new tab)

7. Command + Shift + t (reopens the tab you last closed in Chrome, Firefox, Opera; works multiple times)

8. Command + R (reload page)

9. Backspace (go to previous page; works multiple times)

10. Control + Tab (cycle between tabs/go to next tab in Chrome, Firefox, Opera)

Commonly Used Shortcuts in Most Applications

11. Command + Z (undo last operation)

12. Command + Y (redo last operation)

13. Command + O (open file)

14. Command + S (save)

15. Command + W (close active window or file)

16. Command + Q (quit application)

Copy-and-Pasters' Delight

17. Command + A (select all in active window; e.g., select all text on page)

18. Command + X (cut to clipboard)

19. Command + C (copy)

20. Command + V (paste)

Find, Select, and Navigate Text

21. Command + F (find; helpful if you're searching for a particular word on a website or document)

22. Command + Shift + down arrow (select until end of line)

23. Command + Shift + up arrow (select until beginning of line)

24. Command + up arrow (move cursor to top/start of document)

25. Command + down arrow (move cursor to bottom/end of document)

Since a lot of us use Microsoft Word for Windows and Word for Mac as our default editor at work and home, here is a column of Jill’s on achieving greater productivity with the Redmond Beast.

Read it and learn it.

Tom Briant

Editor, Macvalley Blog