Be Quicker

These shortcuts will speed up your day by a few milliseconds, but hey, every second counts in this “time is money” world. Using the key known as the Windows Logo Button or Windows Key, it’s the key on your keyboard with a little picture on it (the Windows Logo as shown on the left), generally next to the [ALT] key.

So, here are the top 5 shortcuts that use the Windows Logo Key. Any key being pressed will be in the square brackets [], for example, [E] means press the “e” on your keyboard.

1 - [WINDOWS LOGO] - [L]

If you use a computer at work or in a public place, this is a shortcut that you HAVE to learn. It locks your computer without you having to click on the “START” button and saying lock. It’s easy enough to do, so you have NO excuse for leaving your computer unlocked when you go and get your coffee.

2 - [WINDOWS LOGO] - [D]

This shortcut is the same as clicking the icon on your task bar to show the desktop (which will minimise all your windows/programs so you can see your desktop). This is useful if you have a lot of shortcuts on your Desktop.

3 - [WINDOWS LOGO] - [E]

This shortcut will open up Windows Explorer. Windows Explorer is obviously that program that allows you to browse around your computer. I’m sure you use it quite often for searching for your files on your computer…

4 - [WINDOWS LOGO] - [R]

This shows the “Run” dialog box. Useful if you use this as a way of running certain programs. An example is typing “cmd” (without the quotes) into the Run Dialog box to open up a command window…

5 - [WINDOWS LOGO]

Strange? Yes and no. Pressing this key by itself pops up the “Windows Start Menu“, which opens up a world of possibility on your computer

But, more importantly, it allows you to assign even more shortcuts to the Windows Start Menu, which I will show you in the next post.

In my post entitled “Browsing with tabs quickly in FireFox” I highlight some of my reasons for why browsing the web using tabs in FireFox is more efficient. Well, if you’re anything like me, that’s not enough. One of the main reasons for this site is because I would like to share the shortcuts I use and think that everybody should use.

So, here are some of the keyboard shortcuts for browsing with tabs.

[CTRL]-T

This will open/create a new tab in Firefox. Remember this one for future shortcuts.

[CTRL]-W

This will close the current tab that you are viewing. Be careful though, if you only have one tab open, it will close your browser.

[CTRL]-[TAB]

This will cycle forward through your tabs. So, in the example in my previous post, if you have Google open in Tab 1, Site #1 open in Tab 2, etc, pressing [CTRL]-[TAB] will take you from the Google tab to the Site #1 tab.

[CTRL]-[SHIFT]-[TAB]

This does the same as the above, only in the opposite (reverse) direction…

My recommendation for this is to keep your left hand on the keyboard for cycling through your tabs, and, unless you have to type anything, keep your right hand on your mouse for clicking on links.

The main benefit to using FireFox is the ability to browse the internet using tabs. The tabs enable you to have just one FireFox program running, and yet have multiple “windows” open. These tabs could effectively be different websites or different pages within one website, or both.

If you’re wondering why you would want to be able to do this, think about the steps in the following situation:

• You search for something in Google
• You see an interesting site in the results - Site #1, for example. So you go to that site
• You read the site, browsing to different pages in the site
• You realise it wasn’t quite what you were looking for, so you click the [BACK] button in your browser until you find your Google results
• You go to the NEXT result that seems interesting
• etc… etc… etc..

Now, look at it from the FireFox perspective:

• You search for something in Google
• You see an interesting site in the results - Site #1, for example. So you open that site in a new tab
• You still have your Google results open in your current tab, so, while your new tab is loading, you carry on scanning the Google results
• You find another interesting site, and open that site in a new tab
• etc… etc… etc…
• When you finish opening up your preferred sites, you close your Google Results, and go to the first tab. Read that one, if it’s not what you want, close that tab and read the next one…

Don’t you agree that this is MUCH easier? For one thing, you won’t wait as long for pages to load because you are scanning and reading one tab while the other tab(s) load in the background.

How to open new tabs in FireFox

There are 3 main ways to open new tabs in FireFox with your mouse:

1. Right-click on the link and click on “Open in new tab”
2. While holding the [CTRL] key, click the link with your left mouse button
3. Use the middle button on your mouse to click on the link