Tag Archives: shorcuts

February 19, 2013, 11:00 am

Learn Your Keyboard Shortcuts

If you’ve been reading ProfHacker for a while, you probably know that one of our primary goals is to talk about those things in academia that people simply don’t talk about. If you’re here–so the logic goes–you must already understand <insert topic of choice here, like which are the prestigious journals in your field>, and so we won’t bother to teach you these things. But these things are important; it turns out that knowing the hidden information of the university is a really powerful way to make yourself more effective in your career.

It also turns out that in some ways academia is very much like the keyboard you’re probably sitting in front of right now. Sure, it’s got those familiar 36 alphanumeric keys. But like academia, the keyboard has hidden information that will make you more effective in your career: keyboard shortcuts.

Keyboard shortcuts can be a great way to get…

May 17, 2011, 11:00 am

Creating Keyboard Shortcuts for ANYTHING

By Brian Croxall

If you’re a faculty member or a student, there’s probably a good chance that the object you touch more than anything else in your life is a keyboard. After all, the keyboard is instrumental for how we do portions of our research, teaching, and service. To cut down on the number of hours you spend with your keyboard, you might use text expansion tools to cut down on repetitive typing. But another option would be to learn to use the keyboard shortcuts so that you have to spend less time reaching for the mouse. While the time savings aren’t tremendous, they do add up.

I generally try to learn the basic keyboard commands for the software that I use most often in my work. Unfortunately, however, not every command in a given application will have a keyboard shortcut. For a long time, I just assumed that this was how the world worked, but I recently decided to ask the all-knowing Google if…