I made a post on ActiveRain about the shortcut keys I'm using on daily bases in Widows based applications and thought it might be useful to other people.
1. Win - you know there is a button with Windows Logo between left Control and Shift - it opens up your Start Menu and if hit again it closes it. On some laptops it is located in the top right part of the keyboard.
2. Win+E - opens up Windows Explorer - not the Internet Explorer - WinExplorer allows you to access pretty fast to any of your logical drives as well as physical (CD/DVD/FlashDrives)
3. Win+D - I like this one :) - it minimizes all your applications and shows you the desktop. By hitting the combination again it restores all the windows back to what it was.
The combinations below are life-savers. I highly recommend remembering them or putting a post-it on the side of your monitor. All the following combinations work in the most of Windows based applications, I highly doubt that you'll find one where it won't work :)
4. Ctrl+A - select/highlight everything. It means wherever you're, whatever you doing if you hit Ctrl+A it will highlight everything in active object - it can be MS Word page, Excel page or one cell, you can select all the content on web page, if select specific field of a form or whatever and hit Ctrl+A it will select all in that field. This will free you from selecting things with you mouse and you'll never have another time when you leave out a character or a word.
5. Ctrl+C - Copy. After you selected with Ctrl+A - hit Ctrl+C and it will copy everything into the memory buffer. This eliminates two actions of clicking right mouse button and selecting copy from the menu. Very fast.
6. Ctrl+V - Paste. Just click with your mouse where you would like to paste and hit Ctrl+V.
7. Ctrl+Z - undo last action. Whenever you edit a document, or spreadsheet, graphics or what ever.. on the web page or your web site back end and while editing you'd like to undo last changes - hit Ctrl+Z. If you need to undo 2 or 3 last actions - hit it that many times. The undo operations are limited, so you won't be able to undo 20 last editing actions.
8. Ctrl+Y - opposite to Ctrl+Z - repeat the last action. It works even if undo things and then hit Ctrl+Y - it will redo them for you. BTW, undo and redo combinations will work even if you already saved the document you're editing, but haven't closed it yet.
9. Ctrl+S - Save. Saves the document you're currently editing.
10. Ctrl+F - Search/Find - if the current application has a search function - it will always pop-up :)
Now, some text formatting combinations - these are very useful in any windows based application that have text formatting options. ActiveRain blog posts and comments have them too, so you can use them while posting or commenting on ActiveRain.
11. Ctrl+B - makes selected/highlighted text BOLD or just turns on bold formatting. To turn it off - hit combination again.
12. Ctrl+I - makes text in Italic.
13. Ctrl+U - underlines selected text or turns the formatting on.
14. Ctrl+X - copies and removes selected fragment. This is useful if you want to move your selection into a different place.
Well, there are many others, but I think I mentioned the ones that I'm using every single day and I hope you'll find them useful as well :) Good luck and don't forget about F1 (Function 1 in the top row on your keyboad) before you bother your IT guy ;)
BTW, did you know that you can create shortcut keys for basically any application you have in your Start menu or on the Desktop? For example I have Ctrl+Alt+C which start Calculator in a flash - very useful :) Wherever your application is in the Start menu or on the Desktop - right mouse click on the icon => Properties => Shortcut (tab at the top) => click on Shortcut field and then within combinations of Ctrl+Alt+.... or Ctrl+Shift+.... you can set yourself a shortcut for any application you're using on daily/weekly/monthly bases. Good luck!
P.S. I just Googled and found Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows on Microsoft's web site.