8 Keyboard Shortcuts in Windows 7 That You May Not Know

Keyboard shortcuts are very useful. It seems that it never feels enough to learn more of them. So here there are, another 5 keyboard shortcuts that we may not know existed.

 WINDOWS KEY + Home

Feel your screen is too cluttered with so many windows open? Press Windows Key + Home to minimize every window, except the one you are current working on.

 WINDOWS KEY + Spacebar

Get bored to minimize all your 15 open windows just to see what’s on your desktop? Just press Windows Key + Spacebar to make all those 15 open windows transparent. Same as you move your mouse to your left bottom corner to peek through to your desktop.

 WINDOWS KEY + Shift + Left/Right Arrow Key

You know you can use Windows Key + Left/Right to flipping a window through multiple screens with different snapping positions. Do you know you can actually use Windows + Shift + Left/Right key to toggle the window between monitors directly with the same size and location? Give it a try.

Windows Key + B

It’s similar to move your cursor over to the system tray, start with that up arrow that hides all the running icons.

Then, pressing Space/Enter key shows up the all hidden running program icons.

It may not be that useful but it does if you don’t have the mouse in control to move your cursor around the desktop.

Windows Key + Pause/Break Key

It opens up System Property window like below, which is equivalent to Right-click My Computer and choose Properties.

This is actually new to me. Because I am opening this system property window quite often throughout my day it’s going to benefit me quite a bit.

Ctrl + Shift + Esc

It opens up Windows Task Manager like below, which I normally use Ctrl+Alt+Shift and Task manager to open it. This is another time saving trick for me, hopefully to you too.

Alt + Space

It opens up the windows system menu, a menu that lets you control the basic windows behavior, like minimize, maximize, move, resize, and close. It doesn’t seem to be that useful in Windows 7 but again it might be a life saver when you don’t have the control to your mouse.

The old school F3 key

When no window was open, pressing F3 key brings up Windows Search window with the cursor automatically focuses on the search textbox.

When you are in any applications that have search function, pressing F3 brings up the search box of the application you are in at the moment. For example, if you are browsing this website in Internet Explorer, pressing F3 would opens up the Find toolbar right at the top of the page.

That’s it for now. If you have any keyboard shortcuts that we haven’t covered here, please either share it in the comments or write us in email.