Tip of the Week: Using Your Computer to Its Full Potential

Your computer, and the many resources you use it to access, are made for utility. As a result, there is an assortment of useful features built into many commonly used systems and solutions. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over some of the shortcuts that you may not have known about.

For Windows
The Windows operating system itself comes with a few shortcuts that can make using your computer much more convenient.

A cluttered screen can be extremely distracting, but minimizing and maximizing each window each time you need a different one can add up to be a major time sink. Arguably even more so, it gets annoying pretty quickly. Windows provides a fix that sounds a little silly -- to quickly minimize every window other than the one you want to keep, click and hold the bar at the top (where the minimize, full screen, and close buttons are located) and shake your mouse. All other active windows will minimize. Repeating this action calls your windows back to your display.

• You can also use your taskbar to accomplish a similar result. Pressing the Windows key and the number of the application on your taskbar will open it, and then can minimize and maximize it.
• If you have a file selected and you need to rename it, pressing F2 will allow you to do so without right-clicking and selecting Rename from the options.
• If you want to speed up deleting a sentence you just typed, pressing Ctrl as you hit backspace will delete your text word-by-word, instead of character-by-character.
• Windows also makes it easier to take specific screenshots of your active window: all you have to do is press Alt and Print Screen.

For Chrome
Google Chrome is a highly utilizable browser, with plenty of shortcuts and features baked in.

• We’ve all had those searches we regret, and Google never seems to let us forget about them--until now, that is. Using your arrow keys, select the unwelcome suggestion, and press Shift + Delete to eliminate it.
• If you’ve ever wanted to move multiple tabs to a new browser window, you know how quickly the back-and-forth gets old. By holding Ctrl, you can select multiple tabs and drag them to an existing window or create an entirely new window.

For Any Browser
If you aren’t a Chrome user, there are still plenty of shortcuts that will work for any of the popular browsers.

• Selecting text in a web page can be frustrating, as you can easily grab an unwanted chunk by drifting your mouse too far one way or another. This can be avoided by clicking in the text where you want to begin highlighting, then pressing Shift as you click on the end of your desired segment.
• You can quickly access the address bar at any time by pressing F6, or Ctrl + L.
• Once you’re done with one of your tabs, middle-clicking it will close it.

How many of these tips did you know about? Are there any you know of that we missed? Share them in the comments!