Chillisoft Blog
 

Learning to use keyboard shortcuts is a double-edged sword.  On one hand, you get fed up with how hard it is to pull off a task and you feel a certain sense of triumph when you find a shorter way of doing a repetitive task.  On the other blade, becoming more efficient in what you do is part of the service to your employment contract.  You’re getting paid to perform a quality service as quickly as you can.

So what then is “the most useful keyboard shortcut you never used”…

Ctrl+A

This is the shortcut for “select all”, which selects all the text in the current control or document.  It’s supported by most text editors, including fields on a web page, email editors, text editors, Office documents.  So let’s look at some sample uses…

You’ve just written a nice comment on someone’s blog and you have that nagging doubt that the browser will get stuck and when you press Back your comment text will have disappeared.  Just before you hit the Post button, hit Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+C.  Now your text is sitting in memory in case everything goes wonky.

Formatting a document … you’ve just drawn up an entire Word document and want to change the font.  So now you scroll to the top, carefully place your cursor at the top, get annoyed, try again.  Then you scroll to the bottom and try to find the end of the selection (or even worse, you try dragging your mouse across several pages).  Instead, just press Ctrl+A and you’ve selected all the text.

You’ve just written text and you want to clear it.  Perhaps you filled in a web field and you don’t like it and want to start again.  Usually you would try aim your mouse pointer at the top left and try drag it, with a mixture of results, including missing the first character or the extra lines and spaces at the end.  Just hit Ctrl+A and Delete.  Job done.

To be honest, I only really started using Ctrl+A in the last year, and now I find myself using it all over the place.  Seeing as I’m done with this blog post, I’ll now press Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C and Publish.