Creating Your Own Shortcuts

Jared asks:

I have been using Pages for a lot of my desk­top pub­lish­ing needs while on my Mac, how­ever, I still need peo­ple in the PC world to view my doc­u­ments. I have been using the Export func­tion quite a lot and noticed that it does not have a short­cut key next to it. What is its short­cut key?

This is a great ques­tion and actu­ally a prob­lem that I have encoun­tered when using other pro­grams. As I love to use short­cuts I find it rather annoy­ing when the one com­mand I use the most doesn’t have a short­cut. The solu­tion: Cre­ate one yourself.

Step 1: Go to your Sys­tem Pref­er­ence and click on Key­board and Mouse Pane.

Step 2: Select the Key­board Short­cuts Tab as shown above. Then click the + to add a new short­cut.

Step 3: In the dia­log box that pops up above just select the appli­ca­tion you want to cre­ate the short­cut for, in this case, Pages. Don’t worry if it isn’t listed, just click other and select the appli­ca­tion via the Finder popup window.

Step 4: Enter a menu title. This is the only really impor­tant part that you can screw up on. You must enter the com­mand exactly as it shows up in the appli­ca­tion so in this sit­u­a­tion the com­mand in Pages is “Export…” Note: if you are cre­at­ing the ellip­sis for this com­mand you can type it by press­ing Option+;

Step 5: Enter your key­board short­cut. For this exam­ple I went with Cmd+E

Step 6: Restart the appli­ca­tion you cre­ated the short­cut for and just like that you have a new short­cut. It will even show up in the menu for those times when you for­get the newly cre­ated shortcut.

Now you can all go ahead and cre­ate new short­cuts for any appli­ca­tion you want.