Keyboard shortcuts and cheat sheets for any computer application can make you a better meeting and event planner. They make you a better meeting planner by adding more time to your day and time is the one commodity that all meeting planners have in short supply.
That being said, here are 10 places for you to find great shortcuts and even some cheat sheets to speed up your day.
Gmail:
The Mack-Daddy of email services can fly when you apply some simple finger flips!
Google Gmail Short Cuts
Windows:
The operating system that we all love to hate has a host of shortcuts to make your life easier and really sunshine… where else ya gonna go? Mac, Linux? Let me stop laughing and pick myself up because until the rest of the world drops Windows, we are stuck with it.
Google+
Google+ is quickly becoming one of the best social marketing devices for meetings and events. These shortcuts will have you getting your social on lickity split and really, Google+ is that good.
Google Docs
Google Docs is the heavyweight alternative to Microsoft Office and a fan favorite around these parts. Here are some shortcuts that will make you a little more efficient in your workflow and will make a good application great.
Google Reader Shortcuts
Subscribe to RSS feeds… then you should be using Google Reader. Here are some awesome shortcuts that will take the hassle out of your browsing if you are like me and only check in once a week.. I wait till the reader tells me I have about 1000 unread posts before I dive in, these shortcuts allow me to take half the time out of getting back to zero unread.
FireFox:
My browser of choice (with Chrome a close second) has all kinds of shortcuts to make browsing much faster.
Internet Explorer
UGGGG. Here are some shortcuts for this browser if you must use it, but really, can’t you just switch to FireFox or Chrome? Just switching is probably faster than learning all of these shortcuts. Let’s be honest, the new IE9 or 10 or whatever version they are on may be fast but it is cumbersome looking, acting and feeling and Internet Explorer has no really cool do-hickies that do neat stuff.
Microsoft Outlook
I won’t pick on Outlook, it is still a great way to check and get emails. Although I have made the switch to Gmail, I still use outlook to monitor a few email accounts, primarily client stuff. Unlike Internet Explorer, Microsoft still has a winner here no matter what any geek wants to tell you. I will not laugh at you if you use Outlook.
Microsoft Word Shortcuts
Yep, word is the behemoth when it comes to word processing and there is a reason for that, Word is a really good program. Here are some shortcuts to make it even better. Geeks (and me) swear by GoogleDocs but there are times when nothing but the original Word will do.
Office Word Shortcuts (up to 2007)
Microsoft Excel
If you have complex spreadsheets, you probably use Excel because it is still the best. These shortcuts will make Excel work even faster and since I hate spreadsheets… I want to be out of there as quickly as possible.
Office Excel Shortcuts
PowerPoint
The bane of the meeting and event planners existence, PowerPoint is showing no signs of going away… EVER. So, if you can’t beatem, you might as well figure out a way to be more efficient when you use this little gem of a product. In all fairness to PowerPoint, it is a good program, it is the speakers that make it bad by thinking that you want to read along while they give a lecture on the Fleet Footed Wombat or the finer points of Organic Chemistry for Dummies.
PowerPoint Shortcuts
So What?
Shortcuts are amazing. Shortcuts Rock. The problem is that most people do not take the time to learn them. Once you do, you can crank through operations without putting a hand on your mouse and that really does save a lot of time.
Do me a favor and do not try and learn all of the shortcuts for everything all at once. You will end up getting frustrated. Learn one at a time and then move on to the next. Start with a Microsoft Application like Word because the rest of the world have fashioned their shortcuts off of these programs and the old adage goes “Learn One, Learn Them All”.
Get to work… you have meetings to plan.
Image by Abulic Monkey
