- This is Household Hacker Quick Tips,
simple tricks to help you save time
while you go about your daily life.
Today, Windows shortcuts.
(industrial music)
Now, if you're a Mac user, don't worry,
we like both, that's why we got you covered down here.
Click the video or check the description
and you can see all the neat Mac shortcuts
that we put together.
Now, we've all found ourselves in a situation
where we're looking at something on our computer,
and it needs to go immediately because maybe
someone's coming down the hallway,
or maybe your boss is walking toward your cubicle,
doesn't matter, it needs to go.
Here's a simple shortcut to make that happen,
on the quick.
All you gotta do is put your finger on the Windows key
and the D key and press them at the same time.
Boom, you're back at the desktop where you can
act like you were just doing something else.
Sometimes you go on a web browser tab bender,
as I like to call it, and you open up 50 tabs
with a bunch of different things, but you know something
important is in there, however you got too many open,
so you start closing them out, closing them out,
closing them out, closing them out,
then once it's cleaned up you realize
you closed the tab you needed.
Well, with this little shortcut, all you gotta do is
press Control + Shift + T right in your browser.
This works for every browser that's popular,
you know, IE, Firefox, and Chrome.
So, press Control + Shift + T, and it's gonna start
opening up all of your previously closed tabs,
one by one, till you find exactly what you need.
Now, here's a great way to clean up window clutter on
your desktop and put two windows side by side
for comparison, select one window on your screen,
and hold down the Windows key, now press the left arrow
or right arrow and it'll still shift over to that side.
Do this for the other window and you'll have
a side by side comparison.
This will also work if you want to maximize the window,
just press the up arrow, and if you want to minimize it,
press the down arrow.
If you've ever written an email in an online platform,
like Gmail for example, you might have noticed that when
you copy something from another page,
and then paste it into your email,
it retains all of the formatting, that could be the font,
the color, even the text size.
This can often look really strange
when you paste it in there and you're about to send it.
Now you want to make it all look uniform so,
here's how you do that.
Instead of hitting Control + V to paste,
hit Shift + Control + V, it's going to paste
unformatted text directly into your email,
and, hell, you can even play it off
like you wrote the damn thing yourself.
Taking a screenshot in Windows used to be a big issue.
You either had to load Snap Tool, or hit Print Screen,
and paste that into Paint, and export it out as an image.
No longer, if you want to quickly screenshot
the active window you're in, just press Alt + Print Screen,
it will automatically make a file for you,
and show you a preview of what you just snapped.
This can also be done for your entire screen
by holding down the Windows key and pressing Print Screen.
The images will be saved to your Photos folder by default.
Alright, so you're doing some really research or writing,
you don't want anyone to see it, but you gotta go.
You're late for that meeting
or your friends are going to lunch,
you gotta go out the door right now.
Well, really quick, just hit the Windows key and press L,
that's all you gotta do, it'll lock your screen,
you can get up, you can move on.
Now, up until this point, we've only been talking about
keyboard shortcuts, now let's bring
the mouse into the mix a little bit.
If you need to make a copy of a file,
there's no need to do the copy paste thing,
just hold down the Control key and drag the file over.
It'll instantly make a duplicate
when you release the mouse button, pretty nifty.
Now, if you do a lot of online trolling,
you know the importance of having
finely crafted words and proper grammar.
Now, sometimes you go back, you look over your post,
and you realize, oh, I messed up here,
I could have been more insulting,
and you really want to deliver that ultimate blow.
Now, jamming on that backspace key to fix words
can take quite a while,
letter by letter by letter, however,
if you hold down the Control key
you can delete entire words in one fell stroke.
It's a big time saver, especially if you just
Googled synonyms for your otherwise benign insult
and you want to do some more word swapping.
Did your dear sweet grandma drop by for the weekend
and you want to use the computer machine with her?
This is an awesome and easy shortcut to quickly
get the screen size magnified.
Just hold down the Windows key
and press the plus key for an instant zoom.
You can go back down by pressing the minus key.
This should work for any app running from the desktop.
Here's how to quickly access your hard drives anywhere
on your system, this goes back to the whole
window clutter thing, sometimes you have
like 20 windows open, you just need to
get to your E drive or your D drive,
and it's nowhere in sight.
So, at any point when you're using your system,
just hold down the Windows key and press E.
This is gonna open up the My Computer directory,
and give you quick access to your drives
without changing the other stuff that you have going on.
So those are our 10 favorite Windows shortcuts,
now obviously, these are global, so there gonna work
on Windows 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, what are they on now, 16?
- [Voiceover] Yeah, I believe so.
- OK, that's what I thought, so, Windows 16,
you're good there too, now please,
leave your own in the comments, share with everyone around,
and we'll see you next time.