Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Once a year I happen to learn about a new shortcut key that just amazes me. Usually it’s because it’s something I didn’t know was possible or was possible but required to many mouse clicks. Recently I learned of control-space and had that same reaction.
Control-Space
In Microsoft Word, selecting text and typing Control-Space will clear the formatting. Since I do this dozens of times a day when copying/pasting text into Word Mail this is super handy. Many thanks to Adam Barr for blogging this.
Control-+ (NumPadPlus)
This will cause any item list control in Windows to “Auto Fit” I use this all the time in the explorer shell to make all the columns in details view automatically fit to the items in the list. If you are a Microsoft employee, you’ll be happy to know that this works in Product Studio. I love this. Doing this on a Laptop is a few more keystrokes since you don’t have a NumPad that you can access without the Function key. I’ll post a way to fix this later.
As far as I can tell, this shortcut is not documented anywhere.
WindowsKey-E
This will launch the Explorer Shell to the My Computer View. I do this dozens of times a day.
WindowsKey-D
This will display the desktop and hide all application windows.
WindowsKey-L
This will Lock your desktop or switch user if you have FUS turned on.
Alt-F1
In Outlook this will hide the folder list, giving your reading pane more room to view a message.
WindowsKey-Q
If you have Office Communicator, this will expand it from the Tray and place focus in the Word Wheel Control so you can quickly initiate a chat.
Control-Alt-M
If you have Windows Desktop Search, and the Taskbar Toolbar visible, this will place focus in that control.