Use Keyboard Shortcuts To Quickly Open Any Windows Program

Keyboard shortcuts are very helpful when you want to quickly complete tasks, open menus, common Windows tasks like copy & paste etc. all while avoiding to switch between the keyboard and the mouse. Like you have some predefined Windows shortcuts do you know that you can have custom shortcut keys to open any Windows software? You do not need any third-party software to do this. All you need is to make use of the feature that is available since eons in the Windows operating system. We will shortly show you how to create keyboard shortcuts to open programs here.

How To Create Keyboard Shortcuts To Open Programs?

Let’s now dive in to see how we can create a shortcut key for a program, so we can open it from our keyboard instead of searching for its shortcut icon and double-click it to open it.

Find the shortcut icon of the program whose shortcut key you want to create.

right click on shortcut key and select properties

Shortcut icon is the icon on which you use to open the program. It can be present on the Desktop, Start Menu or pinned to the Task bar.

Right-click on the shortcut icon, select Properties from the context-menu.

right click on shortcut key and select properties

Now, under the Shortcut tab, find the entry for Shortcut Key. Click on it.

find shortcut key section

Windows replaces the word None with Ctrl + Alt for you when you press any key into it. Fill in the key you want to use to open the program. It can be anything between the characters A to Z or numbers from 0 to 9 or symbols.

You can not use the Esc, Enter, Tab, Spacebar, PrtScn, Shift, or Backspace keys to create a keyboard shortcut.

create keyboard shortcuts to open programs

After you have put in the shortcut key, click on Apply and then OK button. If you receive any UAC prompt, click on Yes to continue.

From now on, to open the program or application, simply use the created keyboard shortcut to open the program. Using this trick, you can create your own keyboard shortcut keys for all your often used programs and become more productive.

For example, in the above screenshots, we created a keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + W to open WordPress.com Desktop app.

When we want to create a new post for My Technology Guide, we can open it quickly by pressing Ctrl + Alt + W and start working.

Creating keyboard shortcuts to open programs saves a lot of time as we do not have to switch between programs and the Desktop or the Start Menu. We do not have to search for the program’s shortcut on the Desktop or in the Start Menu anymore to open it.

Let us know if you have any tips or tricks of your own in the comments below.

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