Keyboard Shortcuts
Instead of moving the mouse across the computer screen to pull down the file menu at the top, press the ALT key once and guess what? It's just like you clicked on the menu bar at the top. Now press F, and you have the file menu. Want to open a file?  See the underlined letter for each command? That's the shortcut key for that action. Press O for open, and you get the "Open" dialog box. All the functions in the pull down menus are available through the keyboard.

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Tabbing In a Dialog Box
You never have to use the mouse in this dialog box, either. The secret key is the TAB key. It moves you around between the different input windows so you can even scroll down the list of files and press enter when you've found the right one. Changing directories is just as easy, using the up and down cursor key in that window. Watch carefully for a box of very thin lines instead of a shaded bar in some windows when your are "Tabbing" between windows. Then press the down cursor key when you want to make a selection in that window.
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Default Button Settings
Do you ever have dialog boxes that pop up and ask you to choose between yes and no? If you look closely at the two buttons, you'll see that one of the buttons has a darker line around it. That highlighted button is the default choice for that dialog. Instead of moving the mouse to click on a defaulted OK or YES button, just hit the ENTER key. And if the choice you want is not highlighted? Press the TAB key and move between buttons until your choice is highlighted and then press ENTER.
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Moving Within a Document
Don't forget the PageUp and PageDn keys to move within a document, even a browser screen. You can also use the cursor keys up and down, and even sideways if the document is larger than your open window.
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Special Keyboard Shortcuts
There are many more keyboard shortcuts available to different Windows programs. For example, most text processing programs allow you to highlight text by holding down the SHIFT key and using either the PageDn key or the up/down cursor keys. Then once the text is highlighted, you can use the ALT + E keys to access the edit menu. Experiment around with the programs you use, try the TAB, SHIFT (other than capital letters), and ALT keys. Some pull-down menus will give you shortcuts built in to the program, such as CTRL +P combination for File/Print. Explore!
 
 
 
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