No Long Road... Shortcuts are king!

Grumpy Admin, is the type of person who watches over someone trying to do something and has to strongly fight the urge to grab the keyboard, repeatedly hit them over the head till they fall off their perfectly positioned and workplace health and safety check sheet approved swivel chair and take their place so I can do the job faster! Frustration is a common enemy I face!

If like me, you have grown up with Windows and you are lazy. Remember, Bill Gates once said, if you have something complicated to do give it to the laziest person you have as you know they will find the fastest way of doing it! You will know that there are some universal keyboard shortcuts and conventions, which aren’t really shortcuts, they are now just the way of doing things.

So watching someone manually selecting all the text in cisco config file opened in notepad by scrolling up highlighting with the mouse and then right clicking and selecting copy instead of ctrl-a ctrl-c makes me GRUMPY!
The amount of times I see this just bugs me!  So I just wanted to share with people as a reminder, so that I don’t snap and get so grumpy that the health and safety executive have to open an investigation in to the large portion of deaths on site, that seem to mirror methods favoured by the BOFH.

So here is a quick reminder of some Windows Shortcut keys!

Windows Key + L – Locking Workstation guys. Seriously, why press alt-ctrl-del and then move your mouse to lock workstation button?

shift-del – Seriously you right click delete and then try to find your recycle bin to right click empty it! Seriously, if you want it gone just Shift Delete it!!! Not hard!

alt-f4 – kill kill kill – seriously, moving your mouse them few extra cm’s is bonkers, just alt-f4 it!

If I have to cover ctrl+c/x/v, I will seriously track you down and demonstrate how to do a ctrl+x on your ass with a big knife!

ctrl-z – lets undo something shall we – don’t bother going file menu -> edit -> undo with the mouse, ctrl-z might save the day and 5 seconds of my life watching you!

Word processing, OMG ctrl-b to make things bold ctrl-u to underline, and to italic you use ctrl-i

Now with in explorer with the mouse you can add the shift key and a right click to get the alternative commands menu! Now a great time is holding down the alt key and double clicking a file, this will bring up the properties box of the item, why bother going to right click -> properties – saves quite a bit of time!

ctl-esc – brings up the start menu! But if you have a start button it’s a bit ummm pointless

ctl-shift+esc – this loads the task manager – a very very handy shortcut that I use all the time

In most Windows programs, if there is a menu bar on the top, if you press the alt key it will focus the menu and underline the first letter (or a sensible letter) in each menu item… tip press that letter and it will activate the item!!!!

So  alt-f followed by S in notepad will bring the save dialog box. Wow that is magic right! Another one which gets me, is people who select an item in explorer, then right click and rename – why not just press f2 and type! You can even rename a whole selection of files, explorer will make it nice for you 🙂

Hhow many time have you guys been in a presentation, where the instructor or presenter has a laptop and he/she is fumbling around in display properties to get his screen on the projector… simple guys  press Windows Key + P!!!

The thing that makes me the most grump is people that don’t tab between forms, the spend the second, finding their mouse cursor and then clicking on the next field and then start type and then click away to the next field. Makes installing shit slow and painful!

Some links that might be good to leave in open areas like next to the coffee machine or stuck to the back of the loo! To help reduce the possibility of work place accidents due to peoples lack of keyboard skills! Health and Safety is everyone’s business right!

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/126449?wa=wsignin1.0

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/keyboard-shortcuts#keyboard-shortcuts=windows-7

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts

</rant>

Hazzy –only shortcuts keyboard shortcuts were used to format this blog post! Out of principle!