For my first blog, I wanted to make something helpful for me, but also for anyone out there reading it right now. At the time of writing, I am currently on my third day of the Data School and I am absolutely loving it. However, I will go into that more deeply in a later blog.

Coming into the Data School I learnt that a few of my colleagues started on a MAC, and some on a Windows PC. Personally, I have only ever used Windows and it will probably remain that way for the foreseeable future because of my love for gaming. In all my years of gaming on a Windows PC, hotkeys or shortcuts become one of the most important tools in my repertoire. If you have ever played World of Warcraft, you would know what I mean. It was even normal practice to make a macro hotkey to activate multiple abilities at the click of a button. Similarly to a little tool you might know as Alteryx!

Similarly, hotkeys are very useful when navigating your computer, and even building worksheets and workflows. The one second or few milliseconds that you save by using a hotkey instead of clicking on something will add up and could possibly save you time in the long-run. However, like everything in life, it is always about preference. So let's get our pinkies ready and set on those special keys and learn (or not!) some hotkeys.

Flaming Hotkeys:

• DELETE | Does exactly what it says on the tin.
• CTRL - | Z | Undo
• CTRL - Y | Undo's lesser known sibling: Redo
• CTRL - C & V | Copy & Paste (Useful in Alteryx & Tableau!)
• CTRL - W | Close the current tab you're on.
• ALT - F4 | The holy grail of computer pranks. Believe it or not, this hotkey does NOT fix all your life problems. It closes the window you have up on your screen.
• CTRL - N | Create a new file, document, window, worksheet or workflow.
• CTRL - T | Create a new tab in chrome.
• CTRL - S | Save the document, worksheet, workflow...
• CTRL - Shift - S | Save file as... Also saves all your open workflows on Alteryx! Very nice.
• ALT - TAB | Probably my favourite hotkey of all time, it "tabs" you out of the current application you're using. You can use it to flick through open apps by holding the ALT button and repeatedly clicking TAB.
• CTRL - TAB | Similar to the previous one, but flicks through tabs and Alteryx Workflows!
• CTRL - ALT - DELETE | The one stop shop for when something goes wrong. If an app is not responding or an unnecessary amount of time, use this to open the task manager and end its' process. Also used to check how much CPU and memory your apps are using up.
• WIN | Opens the start menu
• WIN - L | Lock your PC. When you leave your PC unsupervised, please use this... otherwise you might find a little surprise is left somewhere on your PC.
• WIN - E | Opens file explorer.
• ARROW - Move one character per click
• CTRL - ARROW | Move one word per click.
• FN - ARROW | Move on line per click (Add shift to any of these arrow hotkeys and it highlights)
• WIN - ; | Emoji keyboard, perfect for Convo.

Keep in mind most hotkeys have many different functions, and these might do different things on different apps.

There are probably many more that I missed so if you, the readers, feel like there's an important hotkey I missed, feel free to let me know! My only hope is that at least one thing here made you think "Oh, that's cool".