Keyboard Shortcuts

Do you have a phone, tablet or laptop with a onscreen keyboard?  If so, do you know that it has some really neat features that can save you time and frustration?  Most people, including me until recently, don't know what treasures that keyboard holds.

Let's consider the use of accents while typing.  Suppose you are working on your resume – no, not getting back to what you were previously doing, but rather your résumé, your work history.  You want to be grammatically correct, but those little accent marks above the ‘e’ require extra time and effort.  However, there are two quick ways to insert them when you use the onscreen keyboard.

The first way is to set the keyboard for ‘predictive’ typing so that a bar above the keyboard has a selection of three words, based on the first few letters you type.  Type in r-e-s-u and one of those words will probably be résumé.  If that isn't the case, use the second method; type the ‘e’ with the forward accent and résumé should now appear on the predictive bar.  Tap it, or use your mouse to click on it if you don't have a touch screen and the word will be added to the document.

Okay, now you're probably asking, “How do I type the accented ‘e’?”  Here's how. Hold the ‘E’ key down until a pop-up window appears above it.  In the window are all of the accent combinations for the letter ‘e’.  Merely slide your fingertip or cursor up to the one you want and then lift it off and the accented ‘e’ will be in your document.

The accented letter shortcut works for all letters that use accents, including the ‘ç’ we use in words like façade, or ‘ñ’ and accented vowels frequently used in foreign language words.

If you use a physical keyboard, there are keyboard shortcuts for them, too, but it requires the use of two or more keys to type accented letters.  It requires a lot of work and memorization to achieve the same result.

Another neat shortcut on the qwerty keyboard is  in the lower right, those two keys that have the comma, exclamation point, period and question mark.  They hold two more punctuation marks, the apostrophe and the quotation marks.  Just press and hold the key until the apostrophe, or quotation mark appears, then release the key and the mark will be on your document.

Once you're used to typing with the onscreen keyboard, you’ll never want to go back to the detached keyboard.  There is one warning that you must heed, however. It is all too easy to let the wrong word get into your sentence, and I don't mean that you should just use the spell checker.  You must proofread your documents to catch any of those erroneous and confusing words. But then, we should always do that anyway, shouldn't we?