Giving your productivity levels a boost whilst at work doesn’t have to mean you need to go to extensive lengths.
There are many keyboard shortcuts that can be used when working on a computer, laptop or PC that can really improve your productivity, and make your time more efficient (whilst putting in less effort!).
Here are 11 of our favourite keyboard shortcuts that we think are essential to every PC user:
Cut, copy and paste
Long gone are the days when you needed to use a mouse heavily when text-editing; keyboard shortcuts are the way forward!
Highlight some text and press Ctrl+C to copy it, or Ctrl+X to cut. Once you’ve decided where you want the text to be cut/copied to, hold your cursor there, click and press Ctrl+V.
This is one of the keyboard shortcuts that can save you the most amount of time when editing a text document (or even blog post!), and definitely is our most-used shortcut.
Bold, italic and underline
Especially useful in Word documents and/or notepads, the essential keyboards shortcuts for text formatting are definitely worth remembering.
Hold Ctrl+U to underline, Ctrl+B to make text bold, and then Ctrl+I for italic text.
Even though they’re some of the easiest shortcuts to remember, it’s surprising how many people tend to forget about them!
Toggle between programs
Simultaneously pressing Alt+Tab can help you to switch between running applications on your PC.
This keyboard shortcut works especially well for us when we’re doing some research with a lot of tabs open on Google Chrome. When you have more than 2 tabs open, it definitely helps and can avoid extra mouse work!
Home and end
A painfully long webpage or document often tends to mean you’ll spend what seems like hours trying to get to the end of.
The ‘Home’ and ‘End’ buttons on your keyboard will do exactly as they sound – ‘home’ takes you to the top of a page and ‘end’ to the end.
This keyboard shortcut is also great if you’re entering something in a small cell (like Excel, or a long URL in a search bar) and eliminates the need to endlessly press your arrow buttons!
Search
How many times have you been editing a document or browsing a webpage to find something tiny in a huge chunk of text?
Instead of searching like a needle in a haystack, the Ctrl+F (meaning ‘find’) brings up a search box for you to enter the text you’re looking to find.
Hunting down the ‘print’ option on a webpage or document can sometimes be a tricky task, especially with all of the new updates that often come with different programs.
Pressing Ctrl+P is one of the best ways to bring up your printing setup options; making it ideal for printing in a rush!
So, instead of your Ctrl key sitting unused on your keyboard, use these essential keyboard shortcuts and make your tasks much easier (and a lot more time efficient!).
