In a world where we rely on being able to use technology quickly and easily in our day-to-day lives, how we navigate and use our keyboards can make a huge difference in the amount of time simple tasks on our computers take. It is undoubtedly with this reasoning in mind that Apple first decided to innovate and create their own variety of keyboard shortcuts for their Mac users – expanding on those already considered standard for a desktop keyboard.
While you don’t need to know all the shortcuts available, having a few good ones to hand may be helpful in enhancing your Mac experience and speeding up your workflow. Below, we explore the most important keyboard shortcuts for editing documents and explain how they are useful.
The essentials
Any computer user knows just how vital it is to be able to cut, copy, paste, highlight, and underline words when creating or editing a document online. As such, these keyboard shortcuts have long been available on a desktop keyboard and are a great example of how we have shortened the time spent on manually processing tasks – in this case either clicking to highlight what we want to copy, then right clicking to bring up the copy and paste menu, or using the symbols on a program like Microsoft Word to put words in bold, italics, and, underline them.
For Mac users the commands needed to quickly undertake these tasks instead are as follows:
-Highlight the text and hold down “command” and the letter “c” to copy
-Highlight the text and hold down “command” and the letter “x” to cut
-Highlight the text and hold down “command” and the letter “v” to paste
-Highlight the text and hold down “command” and the letter “b” to put words in bold
-Highlight the text and hold down “command” and the letter “i” to put words in italics
-Highlight the text and hold down “command” and the letter “u” to underline words
If, for any reason, you decide you don’t want the text in bold, italics, or underlined anymore, simply repeat the command to undo it or use “command” and then the letter “z” to undo.
Important to have to hand
Now you’ve mastered the basics, it’s time to try some of the lesser known, but still incredibly helpful, shortcuts that’ll save you using your mouse or trackpad. The commands listed here will help you with some tasks you might not do every day including saving, printing, searching for specific words in your document, or adding a hyperlink.
-Hold down “command” and the letter “s” to save your work quickly, particularly in the case your application freezes as this might just prevent you from losing a chunk of newly edited text.
-Hold down “command” and the letter “p” to bring up the printer dialog menu so you can print out your document.
-Hold down “command” and the letter “f” to find words within a document or on a webpage. This is great if you want to quickly get to a certain point in your text or want to know how often you’ve used a word.
-Highlight the text and hold down “command” and the letter “k” to add a hyperlink. This can help you link back to your webpage source and add credibility to your work.
Nice to know
Finally, there are a few more commands that you might not use regularly but that are still handy to know, especially if you are writing or editing a particularly complex document and want to be able to delete words quickly, look up their meaning in an online dictionary, or strikethrough something to correct it.
-Hold down the “option” key and the “backspace” or delete key to delete the word on the left of the cursor.
– Hold down the “control” key and the letter “k” to delete all the text between the cursor and the end of a sentence. Both of these will save you having to hit the key for each letter and allow you to delete words much more quickly.
Display the definition of a highlighted word by pressing “command”, “control”, and the letter “d” – unless you are using Google Docs in which case the sequence needed is “command”, “shift”, and the letter “y”.
To use strikethrough on a word or phrase and indicate it is not needed, highlight the text and press “command”, “shift” and the letter “x”.
Will you be trying out these shortcuts? Which one is your favourite? Let us know in the comments section. And, if you’re interested in all things Apple these posts might also be of interest to you:
- How to turn your Notes App into a useful scanner for important documents
- Three awesome features to try out on your iPhone now
- What exciting, new, features are available with the iPhone 13?
For any questions or other technology queries please tweet us at @techtroublesho1.
Tech Troubleshooting 