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Brett Molina:
Hey there, listeners. It’s Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech.
When I say command-option-escape or control-alt-delete or control-C or control-V, do you know what I’m talking about? Obviously, if you’ve used computers at all in your life, then you obviously know what all that means. But there’s a lot more you can do with your keyboard and some really cool shortcuts you can take that will help you operate even faster on your computer. My colleague Kim Komando writes about this in a story that you can read on tech.usatoday.com. It’s called Seven Smart Keyboard Shortcuts to Save Time. I will share a couple here. You know how the drill goes if you’ve been a long time listener to this podcast. I will share a couple tips here. If you want the rest, you have to go read Kim’s column.
Let’s start with an easy one, switching between windows. If you’re multitasking, I do it a lot, but you might be on a browser, you might be on your email, you might be going through a Slack or a Teams platform. Whatever the case may be, you’ll want to switch between apps pretty routinely. One of the best things you can do is switch between windows, and the easiest way to do that is alt-tab on a PC or command-tab on a Mac. It’s very simple, super quick, allows you to really quickly just get, you’ll see a series of windows pop up and you can just go through.
The next tip, locking your computer down. It’s good to do if you know you’re going to away from your computer for a while and you just want to lock it, make sure it’s safe. Easiest way to do that if you’re on a PC, hit windows and L. If you’re on a Mac, you hit control, command, and Q, and you lock your screen and you’re all set.
The last tip that I will offer, and this is when I come across a lot because sometimes I want to take a screenshot and I always forget what is the command? It always escapes me now. I figured it out. It took me a minute, but now I figured it out. If you want to take a picture of your screen, on a PC, easiest way to do it, hit the windows icon, shift, and S at the same time. You’ll see a prompt that pops up. It’ll give you options for how you want to crop the screen. You might just want to crop a straight rectangle. You might want to do it in another or shape. You pick what you want and then you do it. And then after that, you might see it pop up in the corner and then you go to save it or do whatever you want.
On a Mac, you hit shift-command-4 and same thing. You almost hear a little click like a camera. It’s also good too because you can actually draw out how much of the screen you want to capture, so it’s really nice if you’re looking to do something on little bit more advanced.
To learn more keyboard shortcuts, make sure you go to Kim’s column on tech.usatoday.com. Listeners, let’s hear from you. Have any comments, questions, or show ideas? Any tech problems you want us to try to address? You can find me on Twitter, @brettmolina23. Please don’t forget to subscribe and rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. You’ve been listening to Talking Tech. We’ll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Try out these helpful keyboard shortcuts: Talking Tech podcast
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