Learning to make Windows work for you instead of you working for it can yield many more happy and productive hours using your computer. One highly under utilized feature of Windows is the shortcut icon. Learning to use and manage shortcuts will give you a huge advantage with your computer.
A shortcut is simply a ‘pointer’ to a location on your computer. Every entry in your programs menu of the start button is a shortcut. Any icon on your desktop that has a little up-turned arrow is also a shortcut. When you delete a shortcut (and you can do so by simply RIGHT clicking on one and then clicking delete from the menus), you don’t delete the underlying program or folder.
Create shortcuts for your most commonly used programs by RIGHT clicking and dragging them from your Programs menu to the desktop. Click Copy from the menu that pops up.
Create shortcuts to commonly accessed folders or files by RIGHT clicking on them and dragging them to your desktop. Click “Create Shortcut Here” from the resulting menu.
If you use a card reader to download your digital camera photos, create a shortcut to the folder on the card so that you can access your pictures in one step.
Once you master the power of shortcuts, you will wonder how you lived without them!
