We think that everyone knows about cutting and pasting bits of text or parts of photos from one place to another in Windows or OS X. This kind of shortcut has been around since the age of Wordperfect or even Wordstar. The big difference between then and now? Well, in the old days of word processing (remember when they called it that?) there was no mouse, only a keyboard. These days we’ve become dependent on the mouse and we may have forgotten all about keyboard shortcuts. Here are some of our favourites:

TIP: Many of these shortcuts assume that you have highlighted some text or a portion of the screen or a photo. How do you do that? Click your mouse once where you want to start highlighting then hold the button down and drag your cursor across the screen. As you drag the mouse/cursor, the part of the screen that you choose will turn blue. In a photo program, there will be a square or rectangular shape (usually) drawn across the scree. Once you have a section highlighted, you can let go of the mouse button and use the keyboard shortcuts to perform an action on the highlighted portion.

1. CTRL + c (press the CTRL key and the c key at the same time. This same ‘two key’ process applies to all the shortcuts here) – This copies the highlighted item and puts in up into your computer’s memory (Windows calls it a clipboard). Whatever you put up into that memory is there until you copy or cut something else or until you shut your computer off.

2. CTRL + V – This pastes whatever you copied before into whatever window or app you are using now.

Tip: Remember what we said above about whatever you put into memory is there until you put something else in it? Well, you can make multiple pastes from the same copy just as easily as you make one. If you’re describing a series of photos in an album in Facebook, for example, you can type out the description then copy it once and paste it many times below or beside each picture.

3. CTRL + x – This ‘cuts’ the highlighted item and puts it into memory. Instead of copying, this shortcut removes the selection completely. In a document, there will be a space where the words were. In a photo, there will be a black space where the selection was. We try to copy first then cut if we are unsure about what we’re doing. If you cut it and make a mistake, the selection is lost forever, right?

4. CTRL + s – This opens up the save window so that you can preserve whatever you are working on. This same shortcut will save everything on top of whatever you have saved before. Sometimes that isn’t a good idea. Read the next shortcut to solve this problem.

4. s – Pressing ‘s’ in some programs, Irfanview for example, will open up the ‘save as’ menu. The term ‘save as’ usually means that you are saving something under another name, different than the name you used before. If you are editing a photo, use the ‘save as’ shortcut to create a new name for the edited photo in order to preserve the original. If you make a mistake, you will always have the original photo to work on.

TIP: In most word processing software, using CTRL + s will save the current document complete with all changes since the last time you saved it. This can cause problems if you are editing a document. As soon as you open the original document, immediately click File then Save As to save it as something else. We use names such as ‘originalEdited’ to indicate that this is the edited copy not the original. From then on, every time we press CTRL + s, we save the changes made on the copy not the original.

5. CTRL + y – In most photo programs, this sequence will crop the highlighted section of a photo (remove everything outside the box but leave the portion inside the box). If we highlight a section of a photo and want to create a hole in it, we would use the ‘cut’ sequence then we would paste something else into the hole.

6. CTRL + b – In a word processing program or WordPress or most html editors, this sequence creates Bold Text. 

7. CTRL + i – As above, this creates italics.   (Hitting CTRL + b then hitting CTRL + i would create Bold and Italicized text. (To stop typing bold and/or italics, use the same two key sequence again.)

8. CTRL + (other keys) – In Word and other text editors, there are shortcuts to underline text (CTRL + u), print over or under, insert or delete, etc. Sometimes when you start to type, the letters are doing funny things. This means that you have inadvertently hit the CTRL key and some other key by accident.

9. CTRL + a – This selects everything in the window where you last pressed a key or made a mouse click. You can then copy or cut whatever you have selected. Use this to copy whole documents from one place to another. Performing the same key shortcut again will undo the action that you selected by accident.

Tip: Text shortcuts can either be performed on text that you highlight or before text is typed. Highlight what you want in bold, for instance, then use the CTRL + b shortcut or simply hit CTRL + b and start typing in bold. Either one will work.

 

Every software program has shortcuts. Some use the standard ones listed here, others use shortcuts that are specific to that program. If you look carefully at the menus in each program, you will see shortcuts listed for common tasks. Look at this menu from Irfanview:

There are a multitude of keyboard shortcuts out there. In emergencies, shortcuts like these will even allow you to work without a mouse. We’ve listed eight of our favourites. Which ones do you use? Let us know in a comment below.

Thanks for reading!