Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. We’ve already looked at the use of touch
in Project 2013 and we’ll be using touch at various points during the course. We’ve
also seen how to switch between mouse mode and touch mode. Now for many people they either
prefer to use the keyboard or in some cases they have to use the keyboard. Some people
suffer from things like repetitive strain injury, RSI, from using a mouse too much and
they find it much less troublesome to use the keyboard. For other people, the keyboard
may be the only options available to them. So being able to operate Project using the
keyboard or using the keyboard as much as possible is either a preference or necessary
for many people. So in this section, I’m going to take a quick look at the facilities
for using the keyboard in Project 2013. Now the first thing to point out is that when
we looked at Help earlier on in the course and we found that this question mark icon
is the one to use, if you hover over it you get a screen tip. The screen tips says Help
and then in brackets F1. F1, the F1 function key on your keyboard is the keyboard shortcut
for Help. And in fact many of the commands on the Project 2013 Ribbon and many other
aspects of using Project 2013 can be driven by keyboard shortcuts. Now we are going to
come across various keyboard shortcuts during the course and I will mention the key ones
as we go along, but I must also confess that I am not a great user of keyboard shortcuts
myself mainly because I use very many different pieces of software and if I tried to remember
all the keyboard shortcuts there would just be hundreds and hundreds and I’d get hopelessly
confused. Having said that many of the keyboard shortcuts associated with common operations
such as copy and paste type operations, I do remember and I do use them all the time.
If you look at the Ribbon here for Project 2013, if I hover over a particular command,
let’s choose that one, Team Planner, you get a screen tip. It says Team Planner. But
note that there is no sign of a keyboard shortcut. Let’s hover over another one, Resource Usage,
Resource Sheet, you see how with these there is no keyboard shortcut. But if I go to another
command such as that one, I get a screen tip and note I get a keyboard shortcut as well.
So if you want to just check the keyboard shortcuts, hovering over a command on the
Ribbon will tell you whether it has a keyboard shortcut or not. And if you’re good at remembering
keyboard shortcuts once you’ve identified that, then maybe that’s a good basis for
you using that keyboard shortcut again in the future.
Now if you want or need to use keyboard shortcuts, there’s something that will really help
you and that is if you go into the Project Help, the online version, under Getting Started
one of the entries there is Project keyboard shortcuts. And if you click on that link,
it takes you to a document that lists the Project keyboard shortcuts. Now there’s
an explanation of the what and why of keyboard shortcuts, and then there’s a categorized
list of the Microsoft Office basic keyboard shortcuts; that’s the ones that are pretty
much common across all of Microsoft Office. And then there are the ones specifically related
to Microsoft Project. Now I know that some people print these lists out and stick them
on the wall if they use keyboard shortcuts quite a lot. Maybe you’re very good at remembering
keyboard shortcuts and, of course, how many of these keyboard shortcuts you need to know
depends on what you do with Microsoft Project so you may not need all of them anyway. But
if you want or need to use keyboard shortcuts, that’s a pretty comprehensive list available
there via Help. So now there’s one other aspect of keyboard
shortcuts which is very important and that is that knowing those keyboard shortcuts doesn’t
necessarily help you to find your way around the Ribbon. Given that the Ribbon is so pivotal
in terms of your use of Project 2013, what you need is a facility to help you use the
Ribbon using the keyboard. Now the facility that’s provided is a facility that’s usually
referred to as key tips and basically with the Ribbon as it is in front of you now, if
I press the Alt key, what happens is that you get a load of little symbols that appear
and these symbols are effectively the keyboard shortcuts to operate various commands on the
Quick Access Toolbar and on the Ribbon. Now if we start with the Quick Access Toolbar,
if you look at the top there they’re numbered one to five. Two and three are grayed out.
You can’t undo or redo because we haven’t done anything and we haven’t undone anything
to redo. But save is enabled. The button to switch between touch and mouse is enabled,
and the Quick Print button is enabled. And to do a save I would just hit one on the keyboard.
To enable the facility to switch between touch and mouse that’s four, Quick Print that’s
five. As far as the Ribbon itself goes, then the
letters there, F, H, U, S, R, W, they let me choose which tab I want to operate. So
if I wanted to go to the Project tab, I would press the R key. Press R and once I’m on
the Project tab, I then get a single or double letter keyboard shortcut to operate any of
the enabled commands. So P would operate that subproject command, AP apps for Office, I
project information, and so on. So I could basically operate the tabs on the Ribbon and
every individual command on the Ribbon using keyboard shortcuts. When I finish using keyboard
shortcuts press the Alt key again and they disappear.
So that’s keyboard shortcuts and key tips in Project 2013.
I'll see you in the next section.