Using your mouse to select something and click can be a time saver if you are choosing among dozens of options, some with “pull down” menus. But normally keeping your hands on the keyboard is more productive than reaching for the mouse or touchpad. That is why learning the keyboard shortcuts for tasks you do frequently can increase productivity, even if the time savings are measured in seconds. Those seconds add up!

Power users employ lots of keyboard shortcuts. For many of us at all skill levels, our best-known and most-used keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Z to Undo. It is an almost mystic solution when the question is “Where did all of the text in this document go?” or just “What the heck?”

Popular Science Magazine published 20 essential Windows keyboard shortcuts to save you a click. Hopefully you know some of these, but there are probably some you don’t that will speed up tasks you do frequently. Those are the ones to memorize and incorporate into your routine. You will have to think to use them the first few times and then they will become automatic.

PopSci left off one of my favorites, so I’ll make it a total 21 shortcuts. Shift+F3 changes capitalization. Pointless for a word or two, but great to change capitalization for one or more sentences. Select the text, hold down the Shift Key and hit F3 once to go ALL CAPS, again to go Initial Caps, and again to go all lowercase.