Vista Keyboard Shortcuts

Posted By: Larry Larsen | Mar 18th @ 3:52 PM

I'd play keyboard shortcut Jeopordy with anybody. As a long time shortcut user, I can get by without a mouse - dropdowns, checkboxes, tabs - no problem. Of course, I got to this point by working on computers with problems (and usually no working mouse).

Then Channel 8's Max Zuckerman came into my office and minimized everything to desktop simply by laying hands on my keyboard. Turns out what Max was doing was hitting Windows+3 on my keyboard, which launches the third item in your Quick Launch bar (just to the right of the start button), in this case - Show Desktop.

I realized I have shortcuts to learn yet, and set out to find all of them. There are two sites you should spend time with if you want to be a shortcut power user. The first is this shortcut list at ItsVista.com, the second is this Windows Help site. Knowing these can save you a lot of time in the course of a day, especially if you're out of batteries with your cordless mouse.

Tags: productivity, Vista

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Comments (4)

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Adept

Pressing Windows+D does the same trick. This is useful if you don't have the default quicklaunch icons displayed.

catto

Hey now Larry,

I love hotkeys too. I was wondering if there is an addin for xp to use the new vista windows button + a number to access quick launch items? Some pc's I use still have xp on them.

Thx,

Catto

Larry

Most of the shortcuts should work in XP as well as Vista. That's the nice thing about shortcuts, they tend to stay the same across OS'.

jkrebo

Windows key shortcuts are my favorite because they never fail to impress. Winkey+E brings up an Explorer window, Winkey+R brings up the Run dialog, for example. Another favorite shortcut is using using ctrl-enter in IE. It appends "http://www." before and ".com" after whatever you type in the address bar. For example, if I type "Microsoft" and press ctrl-enter, it'll take me to "http://www.Microsoft.com". In the same vein of IE, holding down ctrl and pressing a number will take you to the corresponding tab ("ctrl-2" will take you to the second tab, "ctrl-8" will take you to tab 8, and 'ctrl-9" will take you to the last tab).

It's funny you mention backwards-compatibility.... Just the other day, I was working on an XP machine and subconsciously pressed "Winkey+Tab" to bring up Flip3D. What I found was that it cycles through items on the taskbar, much like Ctrl+Tab does in IE. Very cool!