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Handout of Basic Keyboard Shortcuts

   September 6th, 2011

Fortune Cookie fortune: There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.Thanks everyone who contributed their favorite keyboard shortcuts. I picked what I thought were the most helpful for someone fairly new to computers, and put together a little handout:

It's for new users, so I stuck with, basic, simple, and common. I hope it'll be helpful, but depending on the person, it might still be overwhelmingly complicated. But if it is well-received, I'll do a second one with the more advanced helpful shortcuts that people submitted.

Feel free to use or adapt it - I made it so it was easy to change the letters on the keys, so feel free to modify and expand.

And please let me know if you see any mistakes, or thought of a way to make it clearer or more helpful - or if you have an image better that the Microsoft clipart I used.

Apple Command KeyMac Users
I added a note at the bottom about how to use these shortcuts for Mac, and I wanted to show what the Command key looked like. While searching for the image online, I also came across the origin of the Infinite Loop symbol, which I had never really wondered about before. Interesting.

Update 10/11/11
Thanks to Adam Van Sickle of the Teton County Library - he worked to have the handout translated to Spanish, and allowed me to post the English/Spanish version here [pptx] for anyone to use. Thanks Adam!




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4 Responses to “Handout of Basic Keyboard Shortcuts”

  1. Swiss Army Librarian » Handout of Basic Keyboard Shortcuts :: Brian Herzog | Forward thinking, inspirational information | Scoop.it Says:

    […] Swiss Army Librarian » Handout of Basic Keyboard Shortcuts :: Brian Herzog Swiss Army Librarian is a blog by Brian Herzog mostly about library and technology issues relating to public libraries… Source: http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net […]

  2. Common Keyboard Commands | virlibrary Says:

    […] across this handy handout of common keyboard commands Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this […]

  3. Julian Gautier Says:

    This looks great! In thinking about how I would present this to patrons at my library, I’d probably move “(press & hold first key, then press second key)” below “Cut, Copy & Paste,” so that it reads better… although you’re probably trying to stress how the buttons should be pressed.

    Oh, any particular reason for including “print screen”? Just curious.

  4. Brian Herzog Says:

    @Julian: yeah, I did fight with that a little bit. I couldn’t figure out how to work in the key sequence, and I was sure people might not get that you had to hold Ctrl down when you pressed the second key. I’ll try to think of a better way to word that.

    As for print screen, we have a couple patrons who want to print various websites, but the website either doesn’t provide for easy printing, or is so poorly coded so that what looks like it should print as one page actually prints on five pages. So I’ve shown people the print-screen-then-paste-to-Powerpoint trick, which is a nice workaround.