Improving Your Keyboarding

Whether you use a computer for word processing, basic internet and record keeping tasks, or something more involved, improving one’s keyboarding skills can help achieve your other goals. Improved keyboarding means you will spend less time getting things done on the computer, from correspondence to typing business documents.

Obviously one of the ways to improve your keyboarding skills is to increase your typing speed and accuracy. This way, you’ll be able to type more characters and words in less time. But typing faster only gets you so far. Being able to type more words in a given amount of time will make you more efficient, but there are also other ways to improve your keyboarding skills.

Another aspect to consider are macro or shortcut keys. These are keys on the keyboard that are assigned specific tasks within the operating system. For example, shortcut keys can be set up to initiate particular programs. Let’s say that you use your email program very frequently and would like to associate a key on your keyboard with opening the program. You would simply create a shortcut key that triggers the launching of your email program.

Additionally, you can set your email program to automatically check your email as soon as the program is started. This way, you can check your email with the use of a single shortcut key or combination of keys. In fact, it is a good idea to use combinations of keys for shortcut features such as this.

For example, instead of having the E key start your email program, it would be better to use Shift+E. Obviously, using only the key E could cause some problems, as every single time you hit the E key, your email program would be initiated. It would be an even better idea to have the shortcut to your email program be the combination Ctrl+Shift+E. This way you’re sure to only launch the program when you intend to. You are very unlikely to strike this combination of keys accidentally.

In the Microsoft Windows operating system, there are already several default shortcut keys. For example, keying the window key and also the E key will launch Windows Explorer unless you have changed this shortcut association within your operating system.

For more information about the shortcut keys used in the Windows operating system, simply look online or search through the help section of your Windows installation. If you can’t find what you’re looking for be sure that you are searching the entire help section.

Another use of keyboard shortcuts is within specific programs that you use frequently. For example, if you use Microsoft Word very often, it is a good idea to create keyboard shortcuts for the functions that you perform often within the Word program.

If you create tables very often, then make a shortcut for the insertion of a table. There are also other helpful features in Word that can simplify managing large mailing lists and addressing envelopes and such. Mail merge is a wonderful shortcut tool that can greatly ease your print and mail tasks.

Shortcut keys can be used with nearly any program that you use a lot. Simply take the time to set up shortcut keys for the tasks that you regularly perform within your most used programs and you’ll be increasing efficiency greatly.

Aura Mirchandani is the Editor and Publisher of Article Click. For more FREE articles for your ezine and websites visit ArticleClick.com. Article Click is a free content article directory.