Best Keyboard Shortcuts

Last year, a friend of mine began a job at an investment banking firm in the Big Apple. For the first three weeks of their new role, the senior management took away their mouse. The expectation was full output for all of their tasks, without the help of their right hand’s desktop guide. A cruel joke? Some test? A weird prank? The task was not malicious (well maybe a little bit), it was a challenge to use only keyboard shortcuts to do the job.

When I heard this story my first thought was pure terror. How lucky I was to avoid such barbaric tests and how intense my buddy’s job sounded. “That sucks,” was my reply in our texting stream of hearing about the first few days.

I couldn't stop thinking about my friend. At the time, I was a fully devoted mouse user. Close a tab on chrome by clicking the little “x” next to the tab. Change windows on my screen by clicking the apps icon on the toolbar. I would even use my mouse to highlight words that I wanted to delete or copy and paste.

After hearing of the running of the gauntlet my friend had to go through at their role, I decided to give myself the same challenge. I set out to learn as many keyboard shortcuts as possible and apply them in my day-to-day. For the first three days, I spent about as much time looking up “how to do x and y with keyboard shortcuts” as I did working.

I want to share a list of some of the most helpful keyboard shortcuts for Mac and Google Chrome that I use. Obviously, there are hundreds more that I have not included, however, I tried to focus on the shortcuts that I use most often and have increased my productivity. Additionally, I did not include any Excel keyboard shortcuts as that would increase this list by a notable amount.

I have also not included some of the most basic keyboard shortcuts i.e. “command + b” to bold a word or “command + c” to copy as I assume those are well known.