This is probably the most-frequently-asked keyboard question for Windows 7: How to use the keyboard to shutdown or restart.

If you have a laptop, it may have a sleep shortcut with something like Fn+F1, but this is how you can go about it universally:

1. Press the Windows key. The Start menu appears.
2. Press the Right Arrow key. The focus is now on the Shutdown button.
3. The default action is to Shutdown. If you want to do that, you can just press Space and your system will begin shutting down immediately.
4. If you want to restart, just press the Right Arrow again. The Shutdown menu appears. To Restart, press R. To choose any other action, press the underlined letter.

If you’re using the new social network from Google called Google Plus, you may have noticed that the Enter key starts a new paragraph instead of ending the comment or post.’

So, how do you stop having to reach for the mouse to click on the green “Post comment” button? Just press Tab to select the button, then Enter to press the button, which will post your comment.

Similarly, for post a new item, press Tab once to get to the sharing area, then Tab again to get to the green “Share” button, then press Enter.

(Note you can also hit Space instead of Enter if you prefer.)

Every now and then, your screen may go blank — especially on your laptop. Whether it’s a misbehaving app or a video card glitch, sometimes you just know that your computer is still running but you can’t see anything. Using Fn+F8 to toggle output modes may help, but if not, try this sequence:

1. Hit Windows key + R to get the Run dialog box. Even though your screen is blank, Windows will ask you what command you want to execute.
2. Type cmd plus Enter to run the Command prompt. (You may know this as the DOS command screen.)
3. Press Alt+Enter to toggle full screen mode. This will force your video mode to text mode, which should fix the display problems.
4. Type EXIT and enter to close the Command screen. That will return you to Windows mode, and your video should now be restored.

Ideally you’d never need it… but sometimes you just need it!

All right, it’s been well over a year since this has been an “of the Day” blog. Facing reality, I have to admit I just don’t have the time to keep this a daily blog. I do hope to post periodically though, and at some point will have time again to do more regular updates. As of today this blog is now just known as “Windows Keyboard Shortcuts.”

In the meantime, if you have questions or need help with anything, let me know!

Suppose someone gives you long list of names, and your job is to find only the unique ones. (For example, if “John Smith” is listed twice, suppose you want to create a new list where John Smith is only listed once.)

This is a job for Excel’s advanced filters, and you don’t need a mouse. Follow these steps.

1. In Excel, create a new worksheet. (Ctrl+N can help on that last part.)
2. If your data doesn’t have a heading row, put a header such as “Names” in cell A1. (Type in the header and press Enter.)
3. Right below the header, paste your data into Excel. (Remember you can use Ctrl+V to paste.)
4. With your cursor somewhere within the list, press Alt+D to open the Data menu, then press F to select the Filter command, then press A to choose the Advanced Filter command. The Advanced Filter dialog box appears.
5. Press Alt+O to select the second radio button option, “Copy to another location.”
6. Press Alt+T to select the “Copy to” entry, and type in the cell location you want, such as “b1″ for cell B1.
7. Press Alt+R to select the checkbox option for “Unique records only.”
8. That’s it! Press Enter to select OK.

A new list appears in cell B1 (or whatever cell you selected in step 6), in the same order as the original list — except with any duplicate entries completely removed.

Chances are you have a backquote (`) above your tab key in the upper left of your keyboard. (This is the same key that produces a tilde, ~, if you press Shift when you press it.)

In Excel, Ctrl+Backquote toggles on and off the display of formulas within cells.

(P.S. Sorry for the long time in between posts.)

Here’s a combination that I use frequently when I find myself in the middle of a line of text and I want to remove the rest:

1. Make sure your cursor is to the left of all the text you wish to erase. (Use the left arrow and right arrow key as necessary.)
2. Press Shift+End. All the text between your cursor and the end of the line is selected.
3. Press the Backspace (or Delete) key. The text is erased.

Much faster than pressing the delete key a bunch of times.

Today’s tip comes from Steve Lacy of slacy.com, and helps you improve your Firefox keyword searches.

First, what’s a keyword search? In Firefox, you can type stuff in the location bar and press Enter. If you don’t type in a URL (such as “tivo.com”) and instead type in a keyword (such as “tivo”), Firefox figures you want to do a keyword search. By default, Firefox performs a Google “I’m feeling lucky” search, which isn’t that useful. However, you can change it to do a regular Google search instead.

Here’s how to change the configuration:

1. In Firefox, press Ctrl+L to go to the location bar. Type “about:config” and press Enter.
2. A warning appears that this might void your warranty. To press the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button, hit the Space Bar. A list of configuration items appears.
3. By default, your cursor is in the “Filter” bar. Type “keyword.url” and after a second, just that option is listed.
4. Press Tab a couple of times until the option is highlighted. Then press Enter, and a dialog box labeled “Enter string value” appears.
5. Now, type in the following value for keyword.url:
   http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&q=
   (The existing default string is pretty close to that — you’re basically just removing &gfns=1 from near the end of the default string.)

Now, press Ctrl+L and type in a keyword. Instead of just taking you to Google’s best guess of what you wanted to search for, you’ll now see a regular Google result page. Click the link you want.

Steve points out that one could easily change this option to any variety of other interesting URLs.

This morning I was working with a long document in Microsoft Word, and I wanted to compare something I’d written on page 43 with something that written back on page 2. I was frequently jumping back and forth.
The easiest way to handle such tasks is to split the screen so that you can display page 2 on the top half, and page 43 on the bottom half, and then work with whatever half you want.

It’s not 100% keyboard only, but try this:

1. Press Alt+Ctrl+S, and a split cursor appears.
2. Press Up Arrow or Down Arrow until the split is where you want it, then press Enter. The screen is split.
3. Now, scroll to wherever you want (and remember the Ctrl+G or F5 shortcut that lets you go to whatever page you want right away). You scroll in one half, while the other half of the split displays the other portion of the document.
4. I don’t know of a keyboard method to change which part of the split you work with, so you’ll need to use the mouse to click in the top portion or bottom portion as needed if you want to make edits.
5. When you’re all done with the split, press Alt+Shift+C, and the split is removed.

Note that a split is really just a different way of viewing the same document — you only have one copy. Any changes you make in the top portion are immediately reflected in the bottom portion, and vice versa.

Along the same lines as yesterday’s trick, if you Ctrl-click on a link, it opens in a new tab. (For IE, that requires IE 7 or later.)

While I spend a lot of my day without ever touching the mouse, when browsing it’s definitely easier to click on a link to follow it (rather than having to hit Tab a few dozen times until the right link is selected, then pressing Enter).

When doing so, there are a couple of quick shortcuts that work with any browser.

To start with, try press Shift then next time you click on a link. Instead of replacing the current web page with the contents of your link, a new page appears, with the contents of whatever web page that you clicked on.

(You can then close this new window with Ctrl+W.)

There are several ways you can see the new task manager in Google Chrome (which helps you monitor your tabs and the overall memory performance for the pages you’re browsing).

You can:

• Right-click in the title bar at the top of the Chrome window and select “Task manager” from the shortcut menu that appears.
• Press Alt+Space to see that same shortcut menu, then use the up and down arrow keys until Task manager is highlighted, then press Enter.
• Press Alt+Space, T
• Or just press Shift+Esc.

To close the Task manager dialog box, simply hit Esc.

(Since we had yesterday off for Labor Day, two posts today!)

One new concept in Chrome is the idea of an incognito session, where the history and cookies are not preserved. This could be useful if, for example, you’re at a friend’s house or an Internet café, or if you don’t want your spouse to see that you’ve been shopping for a surprise birthday present. Or other things.

To start a new incognito session in Chrome, just press Ctrl+Shift+N. A new window appears, with slightly different coloring and a “secretive browser person” icon at the top.

(To close the incognito session, just press Alt+F4 as you normally would to close a program. All tabs in your new window close at once.)

Google Chrome was released in beta today (Tuesday, September 2). This is Google’s browser, currently only for Windows, and its arrival rekindles the browser wars into a three-way race between Mozilla’s Firefox, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and now Google’s Chrome.

Chrome offers much faster loading speed and more stability as its main differentiators, but also a new feature called an “incognito session” (which we’ll cover later today), plus the ability to quickly use web sites (such as Gmail) as applications on your desktop and Start menu.

The majority of the Firefox keyboard shortcuts we’ve covered here previously do work in Chrome. There are a few exceptions, which I’ve outlined below.

Here’s what works:

• For tab navigation, you’ll use Ctrl+T to create a new tab, Ctrl+1 or Ctrl+2 (etc.) to switch tabs (or Ctrl+Page Up/Ctrl+Page Down), Ctrl+W to close a tab, and Ctrl+Shift+T to re-open a tab you just closed. Ctrl+L still jumps you up to the location bar (called an “omnibox” in Google Chrome parlance).
• Ctrl+R or F5 reloads the page. (And Ctrl+R or Ctrl+F5 forces a reload.)
• For navigation, Alt+Home goes to the home page and you can use Alt+Left Arrow and Alt+Right Arrow (or Backspace and Shift+Backspace) to go back or forward a page in your history.
• Ctrl+B toggles on/off the bookmark bar.
• Ctrl+D still sets a bookmark.
• Ctrl+J opens a download tab.
• Ctrl+H opens a history tab.
• Ctrl+U views source.
• You set font size the same way: Ctrl+= (aka Ctrl++) still makes the font bigger, Ctrl+- (dash) makes the font smaller, and Ctrl+0 resets it back to normal.
• Ctrl+K or Ctrl+E to search does still work too, but not quite in the same method as Firefox: It simply moves you up to the omnibox with a question mark pretyped, which will then allow you to type in your search term and press Enter to get a search result. (You cannot choose a specific search engine with Alt+Down Arrow as you can with Firefox.)
• Alt+Enter after typing a URL in the omnibar still opens a new tab with that content.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the keyboard control of Chrome, but there’s a lot of room for improvement in this beta:

• There’s no apparent way to open the “Control the current page” and “Customize and control Google Chrome” dropdown menu icons in the upper right, except by clicking.
• In a very serious breach of Windows usability, the F1 key does nothing at all instead of calling up help.
• The list of keyboard shortcuts in their help is very incomplete.
• Ctrl+S does nothing instead of saving the current web page, although you can right-click (even with Shift+F10) and choose “Save as” from the shortcut menu.
• At least one keyboard command, Ctrl+O to open a file, has no listing anywhere on any menu. (All keyboard shortcut commands should have toolbar icons or menu entries as equivalents, and those icons or commands should always list the keyboard shortcut as a visual reminder.)
• When Chrome offers to save a password when you log in to a site, there’s no keyboard method to say yes or no — you have to click on one of the buttons that appear.
• You can’t navigate your saved bookmarks in a menu to select a site as you can with Firefox’s bookmark menu. (In Chrome, you can only click on the bookmark toolbar under “Other bookmarks” or search bookmarks in the omnibox using Ctrl+L and typing in a few letters from the bookmark.)

Here are some of the Firefox keyboard commands that do NOT work in Chrome:

• F11 for full screen
• / to search within the page
  
• Shift+Delete to forget a form entry
• Ctrl+Shift+B does not let you organize/edit your bookmarks.
• In Firefox, F6 toggles between the bar and the document. In Chrome, it only goes to the omnibox and doesn’t let you leave.

When you start up Excel or other Office programs, they often stick a “Task Pane” up on the right, usually with the “Getting Started” heading. Annoying, isn’t it?

Switch it off one time with Ctrl+F1.

Switch it off permanently by following these steps (which you have to repeat for Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.): Hit Alt+T to open the Tools menu, O to select the Options command, then deselect the “Startup Task Pane” checkbox using Alt plus whatever is the underlined letter (which is different in different programs — nice consistency there, Microsoft), then press Enter for OK.

To finish the options for F9, let’s suppose you really need Excel to double-check EVERY formula to make sure the numbers are right (again, probably only useful if you’ve opened a bunch of workbooks that are huge, manually calculated, and may have been corrupted). Press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F9 to do this:

Rechecks dependent formulas, and then calculates all formulas in all open workbooks, regardless of whether they have changed since last time or not.

I’ve done this before with a spreadsheet that had six dependent files, 60,000 rows and over 100 columns of complex formulas — it wasn’t done until after I came back from lunch.

To continue the theme from yesterday and Monday, there’s another recalculate option — mostly useful if you have a spreadsheet that seems to have been corrupted and you want to check all the formulas. Press Ctrl+Alt+F9 to do the following:

Calculates all formulas in all open workbooks, regardless of whether they have changed since last time or not.

Yesterday we learned about the F9 key and how it calculates formulas manually if you’ve switched off automatic calculation (which you’d only do if you’re working with a big spreadsheet that has lots of formulas).

The technical definition of what F9 does, per Excel, is:

Calculates formulas that have changed since the last calculation, and formulas dependent on them, in all open workbooks.

Sometimes you don’t want to recalculate in all open workbooks. Perhaps, instead, you only want to recalculate the formulas in the sheet that you’re currently working with (because you don’t want to wait for all the other worksheets to get recalculated as well). If so, then press Shift+F9.

Here’s the technical definition of Shift+F9’s functionality:

Calculates formulas that have changed since the last calculation, and formulas dependent on them, in the active worksheet.

In Excel, if you have a big spreadsheet, it can start to get slow. Really slow. At that point, you can switch off the automatic calculation of formulas.

To do so, use the Tools | Options command, switch to the Calculate tab, then select Manual. (The keyboard method to navigate there is Alt+T for the Tools menu, O for the Options command, Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs to the Calculate tab, then Alt+M to select the Manual radio button. Then press Enter to close the dialog box.)

From now on, any time you change a number or formula, the spreadsheet won’t update itself until you press F9.

By now you may have figured out the pattern: When using Word, Excel or PowerPoint, and at the moment when you have a file dialog box open, you can use the Alt key plus a number to select the buttons along the top right.

We’ve already seen three:

• Alt+1: Back (a folder)
• Alt+2: Up one level (of folders)
• Alt+3: Search the Web

But there are several more:

• Alt+4: Delete (if you have a file or folder selected)
• Alt+5: Create New Folder
• Alt+6: Views
• Alt+7: Tools (pulls down the Tools menu)

Because the buttons are in the same order, 1 through 7, it actually becomes fairly easy to remember which button to press.

Several of these, such as Alt+5, are actually useful. Whether or not you use these shortcuts depends on how often you use the buttons. Practice!

Remember, the easiest way to see this dialog box is to press F12 when using Word, Excel or PowerPoint to get the Save As dialog box, or to press Ctrl+O for the Open dialog box.