This can save you significant amounts of time and brainspace. Training your muscles to do this allows you to skip the entire process where you stop typing, look for the mouse or touchpad, move the cursor around and click the buttons and so on, and then put your hands back on the keyboard and get back to work.
This doesn’t seem like much effort, but it makes a massive difference over the course of a day. Here’s how to get started:
In a document or spreadsheet, use your left hand to hold down these keys:
- Shift – highlights text or cells
- Control (ctrl) – skips through text or cells
Then use your right hand to try each of the arrow keys, and see how they interact.
- Shift+Arrow hilights text or cells, one at a time.
- Ctrl+Arrow skips through paragraphs of text, or past empty cells,
- Ctrl+Shift+Arrow hilights blocks of text (words or paragraphs), or sections of cells.
Once these are hilighted, you can use some other essential commands to quickly move them around:
- Ctrl+X – Cut
- Ctrl+V – Paste