Everyone loves a shortcut. In Worcester, MA, I taught a class to high school age students on how to use Excel, Word, and Publisher. I would visit a few times during the semeseter and walk through some hands on labs. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot. Most of the time, I would have to work hard to keep the students’ attention, but each semester, I taught a unit on shortcut keys. During that portion of the lesson, every student sat on the edge of their seats taking note.
There are a lot of small time savers in your internet browser that can add up to an avalanche of time savings. Here are some shortcuts that will work in equally well in your childcare center, whether using a MAC or PC in any browser (IE, Chrome, Firefox) :
- CTRL-F (command-F in mac) – Pressing CTRL and F at the same time will bring up a small box, sometimes in the upper right. Simply type the word you are looking for and hit enter to go through each place it occurs. This works not only in the browser but just about every other program including Word, Excel, and Adobe Acrobat. How many times do you find white rabbit mentioned on this page?
- SPACEBAR (spacebar) – Pressing the space bar will scroll down the page. This way you don’t have to move your hands to the arrow keys or your mouse wheel after you type in the URL. SHIFT+SPACEBAR will move you back up the page
- ALT-D (command-L) – This jumps up to the internet address bar and highlights it. So say you are on google.com and you want to try bing.com. Hit ALT-D, and start typing the new address
- CTRL-T (command T) – Start a new tab. Does your desktop get cluttered up with browser windows? Start a new tab and check your email while leaving your current page undisturbed. Then go back to your original tab by clicking it with the mouse. This will neatly keep all of your browsing in one window.
- CTRL-ENTER (command ENTER) – Tired of typing all those non-sensical “http://www.” and “.com”‘s? Instead, type the center part (e.g., “google”) and hit CTRL-ENTER. For example, type “bumblebeehq” in the address bar and hit CTRL-ENTER, it will magically create sandwich and add the “http://www.” and “.com” to bumblebeehq and take you to the page.
What are your favorite browser shortcuts that you think other childcare directors need to know about?
(If those are old hat, try these)