Tab please!

Many people are familiar with browser tabs, allowing you to open several web pages in the same browser window. Sometimes trying to manage them can be difficult, specifically you might try to close a tab but instead close the whole browser, losing all of your open tabs. The following shortcuts will ensure that you do exactly what you want when managing tabs and avoid frustrating situations.

Open a new tab: Ctrl + T

Close your current tab: Ctrl + W

Open the last closed tab: Ctrl + Shift + T

Try it! Press Ctrl + T to open a new blank tab, go to your favorite website, then press Ctrl + W to close it. Now that it's closed, you realize that you actually wanted to keep that tab around, so press Ctrl + Shift + T and magically the tab you closed comes back!

There are several other helpful shortcuts but I'll leave those for another day.

Zoom Zoom

Sometimes when you're trying to read an article online the text is too small, or it's hard on your eyes.

In your internet browser (IE, Chrome, Firefox) try these:

ctrl '+' will increase your text size

ctrl '-' will decrease the text size

Simple as that, try it right now!

Shortcuts and Hotkeys

I realized that for those who don't use shortcuts everyday it may be confusing how to actually hit the sequence of keys correctly. For the sake of example I'll talk about copy and paste.

The command to copy highlighted text is Ctrl + C.

What does the '+' sign mean?

The general answer is that you hold down all keys in the command except for the last, which is hit just like normal typing. 

Try This:

Highlight this row of text, and do Ctrl + C by holding Ctrl and pressing 'c'

Open notepad or Word and press Ctrl + V, the text should appear!

This same pattern applies to commands with more than two keys. My last post was about minimizing all windows. The command to bring the windows back is 

Shift + Windows Logo + M

Following the same rules, hold Shift, then hold Windows Logo, then press M. Try Windows Logo + M first to shrink everything so you know if you did Shift + Windows Logo + M right when all the windows come back!

Does it need to be a capital letter?

No! Shift is used for a lot of shortcuts and should only be used when specified in the command.

Minimize all

Sometimes you have a document or icon on your desktop but you have a million open windows and minimizing them to get to your desktop is a pain.

Try holding Windows Logo key + M

To bring everything back, hold Shift + Windows Logo + M

Note: Windows Logo key is next to the Ctrl key on the left side most keyboards

Vista Users: There is a Show Desktop button in your quick launch menu (the menu next to your start menu) that will also minimize all windows.

Word bullets

After spending hours drafting a word document, the last thing you want to do is format it. Countless hours of my life have been wasted trying to get bullet points right, and that is what I address in this post. 

How do I add a bulleted list to my document?

Put the cursor on a blank line and hit the bulleted list icon on the toolbar

Click Me!

How do I make sub-bullets?

Hit enter from a bulleted line to move the cursor to the next line and give you a new bullet. Hit 'tab' to change that bullet to a sub-bullet.

How do I go back to main bullets from sub-bullets?

Hit enter from a sub-bulleted line to move the cursor to the next line and give you a new bullet. Then hold 'shift' + 'tab' in order to change the sub-bullet into a main bullet point.
Note: The cursor has to be directly after the sub-bullet in order for this to work. 

A more detailed explanation follows.

I'm ready to to go back to the first bullet level, but when I hit enter I get a sub-bullet. A reasonable person might expect to put the cursor before the bullet point and hit backspace to set it back a level, but oddly enough you can't. If you try hitting backspace in front of the bullet that just deletes it. You bang on your keyboard until it finally works, usually by starting a new bulleted list, but then two minutes later you find yourself in the same situation and frustrated to boot. 

Fortunately Microsoft has provided an answer, albeit one that I wish was documented better.

The easy answer (mentioned earlier), is to hit enter to get a new sub-bullet, then hold down Shift + Tab. The bullet magically pops out a layer and your problem is solved.

This works on all versions of Word that I'm familiar with, and on some clones that I've used as well. 

Alternativey, if you have Word 2007 you can click the little dropdown box on the bullet icon, go to the bottom and hover over "Change List Level" and select the appropriate level.