13 Useful Keyboard Shortcuts For the Insane Workplace

Everyone here at Cracked is pretty adept at using computers, and indeed we've had to be, ever since they told us we had to stop making magazines. And as with most computer-savvy people, we make heavy use of shortcuts and keystrokes to make our jobs easier, because apparently fannying about all day in comfortable chairs isn't easy enough for us limp-wristed chuckle-peddlers.

LOL, looks like you guys could use a keyboard shortcut for not dying in a methane explosion, are we right?

Because we can't do a god-damned thing without enumerating its many variations and rating them on badassedness, we decided to do that here with our favorite keyboard shortcuts. These are shortcuts that we use every day at Cracked. You'll recognize some of them, but others may be unfamiliar as our IT department has implemented a number of different desktop extensions to improve our mirth-ficiency. Whether these same extensions allow IT to monitor our porn-usage - and with the help of webcams, our porn-usage-usage - is as-yet unknown, although an informal poll of Cracked writers suggests that we're pretty cool with that possibility. "Let them watch. They might learn a thing or two."

With that unsettling image lurking in your mind's eye, trapped there no matter how much you blink, let us now turn to the most badass keyboard shortcuts around.

These are probably the first shortcuts most people learn, and with good reason - they are incredibly handy, and used in almost all aspects of computing. Jokes about plagiarism aside, at Cracked we use these quite a bit, editing articles, moving around chunks of HTML, and plagiarizing.

In most environments the Tab key lets you move the focus of the keyboard input amongst different fields on the screen. This is of limited use when navigating the web, given the mouse-driven nature of websites, and because the tab-order of most sites was programmed by a drunk. But it is very handy when doing any tasks which require repetitive data entry; at Cracked we use Tab a lot when entering facts about presidents into our fact about presidents database.

In most browsers, pressing F6 will highlight the address bar, allowing you to quickly type a new url and leave that web site (I urge you to not try this for a few minutes.) With the autocomplete feature in most browsers, this can make switching from website to website as simple as three or four keystrokes. An example: just now, DOB came into my office and asked me which were the most fire-retardant presidents of all time. Using F6, I was able to quickly navigate to the Library of Congress website, and check for him. In this particular case, it turned out that no-one knows, which meant that further research will be required, which meant that DOB cackled and sprinted from my office, which meant that something horrible will almost certainly happen quite soon - a chain of events that would have taken seconds longer to develop without the power of F6.

The favorite keyboard shortcut of slackers everywhere, Alt-Tab quickly switches to a different window, which is often used by people who don't want their bosses to see what they're doing. If instead of writing a column about how to ride a dinosaur like you're supposed to, you've instead been mainly looking at pictures of people dressed as dinosaurs rubbing against one another, this is a useful key to have ready when your boss comes in with his judgin' eyes.

Alt-F4 (and it's cousin, Ctrl-W) shuts programs entirely, which is useful if you've got a boss who likes to get right up into your grill and snoop around the items on your taskbar. You see a lot of Cracked staffers with a hand hovering over Alt-F4 as they work - looking for their other hand at such times is typically not advisable.

This keyboard shortcut is one of the specialized ones we have here at Cracked, which inserts a joke into any document. Our IT guys found this huge book of puns in the children's section of the local library, and hard-coded the lot of 'em in one of our desktop extenders.

For a title promising nutty jokes, few, if any, are actually about testicles.

Obviously not all of our jokes come from this feature, but if we ever need a "quick" gag, we can always press CapsLock-Shift-F8, and bam, right there we have a filthy rag wearing tennis shoes!

Similar to above, but this one only works in Photoshop and only if you've got the right extensions. Shift-Ctrl-F3 will insert a penis bulge into any image you're working with.