Rebecca's Blog

Keystrokes

Maximising a Window Without Using the Mouse

One of the questions that people often ask me is about the keyboard equivalent of clicking on the buttons in the top right hand corner of a Window to minimise or maximise it. Well what you need to do is to access a special menu which is often called the "application control menu".



You do this by pressing alt + the spacebar. The menu drops down from the top left hand corner and gives you a number of options each with its own access key (the underlined letter) :

  • maximise (x),
  • minimise (n).

For…

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Default Buttons in Dialog Boxc

In the vast majority of dialog boxes there is a button that looks slightly different to any other buttons, maybe with more of a 3D look or maybe a slightly different colour.

This is what can be described as the default button. This means that this is the button that gets pressed when you press the ENTER key, no matter which control has "focus".

So for example, when you close a document you may get a message asking whether you want to save changes, you will probably have 3 buttons - yes, no and…

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Quickly change Fonts

Microsoft Word. Did you know that CTRL+D opens the font dialog? It's an awful lot quicker than finding the mouse, moving it to the "format" menu, clicking on it, and clicking on "font".

Astute readers will notice that this is the same as a recent keystroke, but for a different application. How green can you get - we can even recycle keystrokes!

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Windows Without a Mouse

Hi and welcome to the Windows Without a Mouse Weblog.

This is the first of my posts to this blog with some thoughts which you might find useful if you would like to find out more about using your Microsoft Windows computer without using the mouse.

Why would your want to? Well that might be for several reasons
  • it's faster;
  • if you are a touch typist then it's far quicker to use a keystroke than take your hand of the keyboard, wiggle the mouse til you find it on screen, move it to the correct poin…

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