Sometimes it COMES IN HANDY!!! 
One more: in Excel and Google Sheets (and maybe other spreadsheets), Ctrl ; inserts today’s date, and Ctrl shift ; inserts the current time. Useful if you use a spreadsheet to keep daily logs or record data.
Oh and by the way, there are certain notebook vendors that have elected to move the Fn-key to the lower left corner, like so. You know, where Ctrl has been since forever.
One of our customers has such laptops. So every single time when I copy and paste something, I’m hitting what I think is Ctrl-V in growing frustration because nothing pastes, only to then realize that I hadn’t copied anything in the first place. Half the time, the text I’d been wanting to copy is from a now-closed prompt, website, or whatever, too.
Half Man Half Wit’s post reminds me that I frequently use CTRL+HOME/END to get to the top/bottom of a document, and on the work laptop I’ve been using since the start of the year the HOME and END buttons can only be accessed by first pressing Fn. When I’m at my desk I use a wireless keyboard, so it’s only an issue when I take the laptop to a meeting…which doesn’t happen often enough for me to have adjusted to that keyboard’s layout. Usually, if I’m trying to quickly get to the start/end of a document in a meeting I don’t have the patience to re-find the Fn key (which, mercifully, is at least on the correct side of CTRL) and then deliberately hit CTRL+Fn+whatever; I wind up just using the scroll bar.
Shift+spacebar+ctrl+= (insert row with same formatting and formulas in excel
Alt+248 (degree sign)
Alt+8776 (aproximate symbol)
I saw someone added the one for todays date and time. Those are my go to shortcuts superscript and subscripy as well i suppose.
I was wondering that, too. I don’t use Word all that much these days, but all those have been engrained in me as THE standard keyboard shortcuts, as in, if you use keyboard shortcuts of any kind, those are the first six you learn. Well, and maybe Cntrl-Alt-Delete.
I’ve taught about a dozen coworkers this, and to a one they seem to think it’s nearly magical. How they all never considered the possiblity that there was a mechanism built in so could find something on a page is beyond me.
That’s when the video is paused.
Click anywhere on the progress bar of a YouTube video to move focus there, then pgup/pgdown to scroll the video 1 minute forward/backward.
Scrollwheel-press on any Firefox bookmarks folder to open all the bookmarks in that folder in the same Firefox window. If there are too many, a message will ask if you want to proceed.
Shift-leftclick on any Firefox bookmarks folder to open all the bookmarks in that folder in a new Firefox window.
In iTunes for desktop, hover the cursor over the song’s progress bar, then use the scrollwheel to move forward/backward in the song. Each detent click on the scrollwheel moves the current position 5% of the song’s length.
I’m not sure how commonly known these are:
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In a text input situation (input box, Word, etc), shift + arrow key selects (highlights) text. Useful for deleting, cutting or copying a block of text: move cursor to the end of the block, use shift + arrows to move to the beginning of the block, then take action.
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Similarly, shift + End selects everything from the current cursor position to the end of the line.
alt0151 (— (em dash)), alt0167 (§) control z, y, x, c, and v, and control-shift-k (small caps) are my most used shortcuts.
I’ve seen Alt-numbers key combinations in the past, but I can’t figure out now how to make them work. How do you actually do these?
By the way, Chrome for the past couple of months has not been showing highlighted text. When I try to select a block of text in order to delete it from the quoted section, no highlight shows up, but when I hit the delete button the text I had tried to highlight disappears. Chrome is the only program that does this. Has anyone seen it before?
Hold down alt and type 0151 on the numeric keypad. If you don’t have a numeric keypad, then I don’t know how to access them.
I use the windows key plus “L” to lock my machine. Since I’ve been doing tech support in school districts, not one person to whom I’ve mentioned it knew of its existence.
If it’s a laptop without a numeric keypad, there’s usually a part of the main keyboard that also functions as the numeric keypad once you hit the Num Lock key. That should work for these special characters.
Personally I can’t be bothered to memorize those codes. I rely on auto-correct as I mentioned earlier. I have Office set up so that +/- auto-corrects to ±, \mu to μ, imes to ×, \degree to °, etc.
The only ones I’ve memorized are alt-0150 (en dash) and alt-0151 (em dash) because I used to be real nitpicky about their use. It’s been about 15 years since I’ve regularly used a Windows machine, but I still have those alt codes engrained in my brain and muscle memory.
My peeve about the placement of the Fn key is a different one. I like to use page-down to read a long document/webpage; on a full keyboard, you can just comfortably tap the page-down key, but on the condensed keyboards that I have seen, page-down becomes Fn-down-arrow, which means it now takes two (normal-sized) hands to page down, because the arrow keys are on the opposite corner of the keyboard.
I use one that’s similar to minimize all windows except the one I’m working on.
Grab the window you’re working on with the mouse and shake it back and forth a little to collapse all the other windows. Give it another jiggle to reopen all of them.
Blow their minds with ctrl-h (Search and Replace… Word and Excel and maybe some others. In a browser it shows History)
That one is not working for me. Maybe because I’m still on Windows 7.
Ctrl-g repeats the last search. Ctrl-f <carriage return> does too, but ctrl-g is faster.