5 shortcuts to speed up Documents

The fastest way to work in a document is to keep your hands where the typing happens. You do not need to learn forty shortcuts — five cover most of the reaching for a mouse, and the fifth one teaches you the rest when you want them.

The five shortcuts worth learning

• ⌘K / Ctrl+K — the command palette. Type what you want rather than hunting for it: open a document, jump to a product, run an action. ⌘Space / Ctrl+Space does the same, for people whose muscle memory came from elsewhere.
• ⌘⌥/ / Ctrl+Alt+/ — the insert menu. Tables, headings, images and blocks without leaving the keyboard or moving to the toolbar.
• ⌘F / Ctrl+F — find and replace inside the document, not the browser's page search. Alt+F works too, which matters on layouts where ⌘F is taken.
• ? or ⌘/ / Ctrl+/ — the full keyboard shortcut list. Press it when a repeated action starts to annoy you; that is the moment a shortcut actually sticks.
• ⌘⇧[ / ⌘⇧] (Ctrl+Shift+[ or ]) — move between open tabs from anywhere. With the tab strip focused, plain ← and → do the same thing.

Two more worth knowing

Escape leaves a focus or presentation view and returns you to normal editing — useful when a view mode traps you more than it helps. And ⌘, / Ctrl+, opens settings, following the convention from the rest of the desktop. ⌘S is deliberately intercepted and does nothing dramatic: documents save as you type, and the shortcut is captured only so the browser does not offer to save the page to your downloads folder.

Learn shortcuts one at a time, triggered by irritation rather than by study. Reading a list of forty and remembering none is the normal outcome; noticing that you have reached for the toolbar four times in a minute is what makes one stick.

Why the palette is first on the list

Everything else is an optimisation of an action you already know how to find. The palette is different: it removes the need to know where anything is. That matters most in a suite rather than in a single editor — the command you want may belong to another product, and typing three letters is faster than navigating to it. If you only adopt one of the five, adopt that one.

Ettex Docs ships all of the above, and the shortcut list is always one keypress away, so nothing here needs to be remembered permanently. Teams that write the same documents repeatedly tend to pair shortcuts with a template set, which removes the other half of the keystrokes.