I got a lot of feedback about my various articles on shortcuts, so I thought I’d share a few shortcut keys that you can use in dialog boxes. If you do a lot of data entry, using these shortcuts can save you tons of time. Basically, these are the Windows standard dialog box shortcuts that programmers are supposed to follow, so they should work in pretty much any program (unless somebody decided to get "creative" with the standard in a particular application, which does happen).
For example, if you are in a dialog box and press the Esc key, it’s the same thing as pressing the Cancel button; the dialog box goes away and nothing is saved. Conversely, if you have done something in the dialog box and want to press the OK button, you can press Enter instead. (Basically pressing the Enter key activates whatever button is highlighted, which is generally the OK button.) Within a dialog box, you can press the Tab key to move forward through the fields and Shift+Tab to move backwards. If you have a dialog box with check boxes, you can press the spacebar to add or remove a checkmark.
Here’s another interesting shortcut I just ran across. You actually can create a shortcut to shut down Windows 98 with one double-click. To create the shortcut, right click on the desktop and choose New|Shortcut from the pop-up menu. In the Command line field, type C:Windowsrundll.exe user.exe,exitwindows (assuming your Windows directory is C:windows; if not, substitute the directory where Windows is loaded). Make sure you don’t put a space in between the comma after user.exe and exitwindows or it won’t work. Click the Next button and type a name for your shortcut, such as Shut Down Windows. Then click the Finish button.
Before you try it out, be sure to close all your applications just like you would before you hit the regular Shut Down command on the Start menu. Then just double-click your shortcut, and zap…Windows shuts down.