Windows 7: Articles

There’s more than one way to skin a cat – and there’s more than one way to open a program on Windows 7. The Start menu provides one-click access to all of your most frequently used programs.

But there’s an even faster way to start up these applications on Win7 that doesn’t involve the mouse at all.

Suppose you have Google Chrome pinned to your Start menu (as well you should). If you right click its Start menu link and select Properties, you’ll find yourself on the Shortcut tab.

In the second group of options is a box labeled Shortcut key. Press a key combination such as CTRL + ALT + 1 while your cursor is in the box, and presto! – you’ve defined a keyboard shortcut for Chrome.

Now, just press CTRL + ALT + 1 anytime you wish to launch your browser.

This functionality is available for any Windows shortcut. Let’s say you want to open a folder with your keyboard.

Simple! Create a shortcut by right-clicking the folder and selecting Create Shortcut. Put the shortcut anywhere – desktop, a folder in My Documents, it doesn’t matter; once you define a keyboard shortcut, you won’t need the shortcut itself.

Right-click the shortcut as you did with Google Chrome, and enter the keyboard sequence you want to use to open this file. This is a great strategy for opening folders that are buried in your My Documents or My Pictures folders, and that otherwise may be cumbersome to access with the Start menu.

Obviously, you can’t define a keyboard shortcut for everything. Also, keyboard shortcuts are complex and often difficult to remember. Before assigning a shortcut to an app or folder, consider whether it’s not just as easy to activate it with the Run dialog box, which you can produce by pressing WIN+R.

The Run dialog is a good place to bring up folders and files located on network drives, as it will use auto-completion to produce a list of your most recently accessed folders and files on that share.