Putting Those Shortcut Keys on Your Keyboard to Good Use: A Tutorial

When you get a computer, besides the computer itself, the mouse is one of the most important tools you'll use to navigate through your computer programs. Although it is important, it isn't always the quickest or most efficient way to perform program applications or access the programs you need. Double clicking your mouse will open your applications, and allow you to access your start menu and other applications. Right clicking your mouse over highlighted text will give you options to copy, paste, or cut, but this isn't always the easiest method. That is where hotkeys on your keyboard come in quite handy. Hotkeys are a combination of keys, or a single key, that perform certain actions. For example, CTRL-ALT-DELETE is one of the most well known key combinations, and pressing these keys will bring up your Windows Task Manager. This comes in handy if an application freezes and you aren't able to close the program with your mouse. There are many other combinations of keys that perform useful functions, and you are also able to customize your computers hotkeys to perform specific actions that you use most often.

How to Assign Your own Functions to Hotkeys

If you decide to program your own hotkeys, the first thing you need to do is make a list of the programs that you use most often. You should pick only your favorite and most often used programs because the problem of assigning many hotkeys doesn't lie in the amount of hotkeys you are allowed to assign, but in the number of hotkeys are you able to remember. You don't want to have to try a number of combinations to find the right one, since by then it would probably have been easier to use the mouse to perform the action, defeating the whole purpose of using the keys as a timesaver.