Quick Windows Tip
Every now and then a person stumbles across a small tip that makes life easy. Well, maybe just easier. Today I share one of those tips with you, the shift key.
We all use the shift key, but few people know about the additional power that it can provide. Gone are the days where it is used just for making a letter upper case or YELLING on the internet.
On a Windows OS, holding the shift key while right clicking an item in a folder allows you to open the document read-only. Very helpful if you don’t want to lock people of of the document, but still want it open.
The second and more helpful trick that I learned is in Excel. Have you ever wanted to have a single page summary, but just couldn’t get it to work because the column widths for the stuff above doesn’t match with the stuff you want below? Shift can help.
Copy the area that you want and then hold shift and go up to Edit > Paste Picture Link. You now have a picture that is easily moved around, no matter the above column structure. Better yet, if you change anything in the original range, it changes along with it!
Update: As commenter Ryan, of RyanMalesevich.com fame, points out, this is for Excel 2003. For 2007, no shift is needed. Just click the down arrow below “Paste” > “As Picture” > “Paste Picture Link”
Do you have any tips to share?
This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.
Thanks for tip on the Read Only. I actually didn’t know that, and it came in handy today. When I had to do it in the past, I actually copied the file and pasted it to another location just to look at so I wouldn’t lock it.
I couldn’t figure out the Excel one though. Is that for Excel 2003? I was using 2007, which I don’t know very well, and couldn’t take long to dig into it. Since I’m back home on a Mac, it can’t try it again.
Good catch on the Excel 2003. I have updated the post. I wonder what Shift can do in 2007…At least it helped out for the Read-Only.
Thanks for reading!
I have a bunch of tips, but they’re too cool for you and your “Windows”
[…] not sure about all of that, though I have done some posts on cool Excel tricks, but I do know one thing. I don’t have nearly as good of handle on 2007 as I do on 2003. […]