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An Unintentional Week of Keyboard

For some reason (entirely unintentional) I've spent a bunch of this week babbling about keyboard issues. I guess you can tell where my mind is right now.

So, I knew there was no better way to end the week than making sure you saw what's become known as "Charlie's List" over on the venerable Excel blog. It's the biggest list of Excel keyboard shortcuts known to humankind, in PDF form.

And I'll leave you with one last keyboard treat for the weekend, for those of you with Office 2003. Try holding down ALT and clicking a single word in your document. This is pretty useful especially if you select the Translation reference book and you're trying to decipher a language you barely know. It's also a quick way to get definitions, synonyms or other context-sensitive research help.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Posted: Friday, February 24, 2006 4:00 AM by jensenh
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Comments

Darren said:

The new alt-click lookup functionality actually annoys me because I have got in the habit of clicking to cancel the alt-tab application switch dialog box.  If my click happens to land on an office app... I'm suddenly looking at the definition.

And while I know I can hit escape, somehow this click has gotten hardwired into my brain.

Further proving that for every feature you add, someone doesn't like it!
# February 24, 2006 1:44 PM

Kawigi said:

Man, we should eat dismiss clicks.
# February 24, 2006 2:09 PM

Gurdeep said:

YES!
# February 25, 2006 3:45 AM

Paul Irish said:

There's so much stuff like that that no power users know and completely wish they did. (Like how my world got better when I learned about shift-F3 in Word.) It'd be great if after x-amount of use, an office app asked you if you wanted to learn some shortcuts to do your common tasks faster.
# February 25, 2006 8:08 PM

Klaus Linke said:

re Darren's post at the top:

For me, it's Alt+Drag to box-select (mostly to format text that's underneath in several paragraphs, without doing every paragraph individually).
On days I use that a lot, the Research task pane can pop up accidentally 20 times.
And it closes the styles pane that I have always open, so after closing the Research pane, I have to bring that up again, from a submenu of the Write tab.

If I try Alt+Drag again, and the Research pane pops up once more, the keyboard acquires some tooth dents...
# February 28, 2006 2:40 PM

Klaus Linke said:

Oops, Word12 can do several panes, so the Research pane no longer replaces the styles pane.

Kudos for that! Though I'd still love to switch off Alt+Click and the Research pane completely.
# February 28, 2006 2:56 PM

The Office 2007 UI Bible | MS Tech News said:

PingBack from http://mstechnews.info/2008/10/the-office-2007-ui-bible/

# October 27, 2008 6:33 PM
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