Guides

The 20 keyboard shortcuts everyone should know

Most programs share a small set of shortcuts. Learn these twenty and you can work faster in a word processor, a spreadsheet, a browser, an email program and nearly anything else, including programs you have never seen before. The first column is for Windows, Linux and Chromebooks. The second is for the Mac, where the Command key takes the place of Ctrl.

The clipboard

Copy leaves the original where it is. Cut removes it once you paste. The four keys sit together at the bottom left of the keyboard on purpose: X looks like scissors, C is for copy, and V, next to them, points down like an insertion mark.

Pasting as plain text is worth learning early. Text copied from a web page carries its fonts and colours with it. The plain version takes on the look of the place where it lands.

Undo, redo and save

Undo is the most comforting key on the keyboard. Deleted a paragraph, moved a file to the wrong folder, pasted over the wrong cells: press it at once. Most programs remember many steps, so you can press it repeatedly.

Save often in programs that do not save by themselves. Make Ctrl + S a habit at the end of every paragraph.

Selecting

Shift + click is the least known of these and one of the most useful. Click at the start of a long passage, scroll down, hold Shift and click at the end. Everything between is selected, with no dragging. It works on text, files, rows and emails.

Finding

Ctrl + F works in web pages, PDFs, documents, spreadsheets and chat histories. Reading down a long page for one name is the single most common thing people do by hand that a shortcut does instantly.

Formatting

Files and printing

Windows and programs

Alt + Tab is the one to practise. Hold Alt, tap Tab to step through the pictures of your open windows, and let go on the one you want. A quick single press flips between the two you used last, which is ideal when copying from one document into another.

How to make them stick

1. Pick three. Do not try to learn twenty in a day. Choose the three you would use most.
2. Stop yourself reaching for the mouse for those three things, for one week. It feels slower for two days and faster for ever after.
3. Add three more the next week.

A note on a card beside the screen helps for the first few days. The guide How to learn keyboard shortcuts has more on this.

Do they work everywhere?

Nearly. These are conventions, not laws, and each program chooses its own keys. A few exceptions are worth knowing. In Outlook, Ctrl + F forwards a message. In a terminal, Ctrl + C stops a program. In Gmail and YouTube, single letters do the work. But in the great majority of programs, the twenty on this page do exactly what is described.

This is an independent reference site. It is not connected with Microsoft, Apple, Google or any other maker of the programs named here. Product names belong to their owners and are used only to say where a shortcut works. Programs change; if a shortcut does not work for you, check the program's own help.