Notes Keyboard Shortcuts

Posted: August 22, 2009 | | Categories: IBM Lotus Domino

AS a follow-up to my BlackBerry keyboard shortcuts, I thought I'd share some Notes client keyboard shortcuts that I have always found helpful. As mentioned previously, I'm a keyboard guy – my hands are already hovering over the keyboard, why would I leave the keyboard to grab a mouse when I can get it done with what's at hand (sorry about the pun).

These shortcuts have been around forever, but so many people just don't seem to know about them.

In the Notes client, when you want to open a document in a view, just press the 'Enter' key and Notes will open it. You probably knew that one, but so many people will double-click on it as if they don't know there's another way.

When you have a document open and you want to delete it, just press the 'delete' key – there's no need to return to the view to delete it. If there are documents in the view below the one you opened, Notes will mark the current document for deletion then open the next document in the view – nice, huh?

If you're reading a document in a view and you want to open the next document in the view, there's no need to close the current document then navigate to the next one – just press the 'Enter' key and Notes will close the current document then open the next.

If you're reading a document in a view and you want to open the previous document in the view, there's no need to close the current document then navigate to the previous one – just press the 'Backspace' key and Notes will close the current document then open the previous.

Imagine you're populating a database with a lot of new documents. You have a list of data in front of you and you have to add a separate document for every row in a spreadsheet. Perhaps it's a list of postal codes, product numbers or even office locations. There's a keyboard shortcut that will simplify the whole process and allow you to add those documents in no time.

What you need to do is open the view and create the first document. While the new document is open for editing in Notes, press the three key Ctrl-Shift-Enter  combination (I always find it easy to press and hold the Ctrl key, then do the same with the Shift key and finally press the Enter key then release). Notes will save the current document, close it then create a new blank document using the same form used for the previous document (the one you saved using this keyboard shortcut).

Nice, right? This is my favorite Notes keyboard shortcut of all time. It's been in the client since Notes 2 and almost nobody knows about it. Try it out and let me know how much time you think this will save you the next time you need to populate a database by hand.

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