They used to say the surest way of speeding up a computer without spending a penny was learning how to touch-type.

If this was ever true, it isn’t now: the majority of programs rely as heavily on mouse input as they do on keystrokes.

While it’s entirely possible to operate some types of programs entirely from the keyboard, this is actually more of a party piece than a genuine aid to productivity.

The truly productive user will employ a combination of keyboard shortcuts, hot keys, mouse actions and menu operations to move around documents and get things done with the minimum of fuss.

In this first of two articles, we look at some basic ways of working more efficiently in Word and Excel. In the next feature, we’ll examine some of the more advanced techniques for moving around longer and more complex documents.

Keyboard basics
Novice Microsoft Word users tend to rely on the mouse for making selections, moving around a document and clicking menus, reserving the keyboard solely for inputting text. This is an easy way of getting to grips with Word, but having to stop typing and locate the mouse, then guide it to a toolbar or menu, wastes valuable seconds for every edit.

A good way of breaking this habit is to start using the cluster of keys to the right of the main keyboard. The Home key takes the cursor to the beginning of the current line and the End key (you’ve guessed it) to the end, but as with nearly all keys, the actions of Home and End can be modified. By holding down the Control key (usually abbreviated on keyboards as Ctrl) and then pressing Home or End, for example, you can move immediately to the beginning or end of a document.

To move quickly through a document, use the Page Up and Page Down keys. Contrary to their names, these keys move the cursor one screen at a time – not from page to page. When you do wish to move from the top of one page to another, use Ctrl and Page Down or Ctrl and Page Up.

To move to a specific page, use Ctrl and G, type in the page number, then press Enter.

The G for ‘Go To’ is easy to remember, unlike pressing Shift and F5, which is an oddly obscure key combination for one of the greatest time-savers: it sends the cursor back to the last editing point.

So, if you’ve been scrolling through a document to check what you’ve written, hold down Shift and F5 to return instantly to where you were typing, then hit it a second time to go back to the editing point before that. Once you’ve memorised this shortcut, you’ll wonder how you ever managed to work without it.

Natural selection
Before deleting or formatting a block of text, it has to be selected. When selecting a few words in the middle of a paragraph, using the mouse is probably as fast as using the keyboard: just hold down the left button while sweeping over the text to be selected. The keyboard equivalent is holding down the Shift key while using the arrow keys to move to the end of the selection.