Keyboard shortcuts are definitely great time savers. Here is a list of shortcuts for Windows, Word, Excel and Outlook for you to use. Of course, it wouldn’t be possible for an average person to remember all the shortcuts but then you wouldn’t need to. It would be enough if you remember the ones that you would use most frequently. I would suggest that you take a print out of these shortcuts and keep them handy.
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Often, the quickest way to open a built-in Windows XP application or utility is to use the command prompt or Run box, instead of clicking through a series of menus.

To get to the Run box, choose Start>Run. To get to the command prompt, choose Start>Run, type command, and press Enter. For example, to open Notepad, at the Run box or a command prompt, type notepad.exe and press Enter.

You can run dozens of Windows XP utilities and programs this way. Of course, one can’t remember or rather doesn’t need to remember all the shortcuts. It would be enough to remember the shortcuts to utilities that you use frequently.

Here’s a list of shortcuts to some applications and utilities that people use often.

netstat.exe - Active Connections Utility - Lets you view information about your current network settings.

hdwwiz.cpl - Add Hardware Wizard

appwiz.cpl - Add or Remove Programs

ntbackup.exe - Backup

calc.exe - Calculator
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The Send To menu is a very useful feature of the context menu that appears upon right-clicking on a file or folder.

With the Send To menu you can very easily send a file to My Documents, create a shortcut on the desktop, send a file to your pen drive and more.

But how would it be if you could make it even more useful?

It is very easy to add your own items to the Send To menu. For instance if you have a folder that you store all of your music in or a folder where you store all images, wouldn’t it be convenient if you could send your files to these folders through the Send To menu?

Adding your own custom destinations to the Send To menu is extremely easy. Here is what you need to do.

1. Open up My Computer and browse to the C drive,or whatever drive you have Windows installed to.
2. Then browse through Documents and Settings,your user name,and the Send To
   folders. If you look at C:\Documents and Settings\Username\SendTo, you will see all of the files that appear in the Send To menu. If you can’t see the SendTo folder then you may have to turn on Windows to show hidden files/folders.
3. To add an entry to the menu, just copy a shortcut to the destination folder.
4. For example, if you want to add ‘My Music‘ folder to the Send To menu, just copy the folder and ‘Paste Shortcut‘ in the SendTo folder. Now, if you right-click on a file/folder you can see that the ‘My Music‘ folder shows up on the SendTo menu.

If you ever want to remove some items from the Send To menu, just delete them from the SendTo folder.

Starting a program in Windows using the Start>All Programs>…>… is fine. But starting applications through the Run Box makes you look like a Pro not to mention that it saves time too. Here are some general commands that you can use in the Start > Run box. (The quickest way to activate the Run box is pressing Windows Key + R)

Here are some commands that can save you lot of time if you care to remember them and use them.

devmgmt.msc = Device manager
msinfo32 = System Information
cleanmgr = Disk Cleanup
ntbackup = Backup or Restore Wizard (Windows Backup Utility)
mmc = Microsoft Management Console
notepad = Notepad
wordpad = Wordpad
calc = Calculator
msmsgs = Windows Messenger
mspaint = Microsoft Paint
wmplayer = Windows Media Player
rstrui = System Restore
control = Control Panel
control printers = Opens the Printers Dialog

If you have MS Office installed, you can use the following commands to start the applications:

excel = Microsoft Excel
msaccess = Microsoft Access
powerpnt = Microsoft Powerpoint
winword = Microsoft Word
frontpg = Microsoft Frontpage

Apart from the default commands that work in the Run box, you can make any program to start from the Run box. To learn how, please check out my earlier post.