It’s the first Wednesday in November and you know what that means. It’s International Keyboard Shortcut Day. The day when people from all over the world become far less efficient in an effort to be more efficient the rest of the year.
How to Participate
Pick on of the levels below and commit to advancing your keyboarding skills. You will be on your way to greater efficiency.
Participation Levels
Effecienado: When you’re in Excel, only use Ctrl, Shift, and the arrow keys to select cells, rows, and columns for at least one hour today. If you accidentally select a range with your mouse, select something else and do it again with your keyboard.
Key Master: Only navigate between applications with Alt+Tab. Only navigate between documents or tabs with Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+PgUp/PgDown, or Ctrl+F6. Do this for at least four straight hours today. If you accidentally select an application, document, or tab with your mouse, go back to where you were and do it again with your keyboard.
Harry Keyboard Jr.: Put your wireless mouse on the credenza behind your desk. Only bring it to your desk when you absolutely have to, and return it when you’re done with that one activity. Do this for at least four straight hours today.
Okey, you can have this one day – but, the rest of the year it is ‘International Just Use The Mouse Day’…
LOL! Amazing level descriptions!! Hope to reach H Keyboard Jr someday! =P
I still have my Excel 2003 pre-ribbon shortcuts programmed into muscle memory. But I have too many necessary Add-ins on the ribbon to lock my mouse away that long. And DAX and Power Query don’t have keyboard shortcuts that I know about or have learned yet. PQ in particular needs auto fill and quite a few other goodies we’ve become accustomed to in Excel before the keyboard can take over. But I look forward to the day I can relegate custom column creation to shortcuts!
OK, it sounds good, but what about other applications? And what about remembering all the important shortcuts for all the frequently used applications? I often miss some shortcut that do the same in different applications. For example auto-complete a word in vba or in pl/sql developer. Yes, I know, I could syncronize these shortcuts, but it is also a mess…
Excel, vba, pl/sql developer, notepad++, windows, outlook…
Has anyone managed to study (or synchronize) all the keyboard shortcuts? :-)