Google Chrome tricks to increase productivity
We love utilising the software we use to be super efficient at whatever we’re doing. We’re sure that many others share this little thrill as well. Shortcuts are the greatest, they make you feel good about how tech savvy you are as well as making your work move quickly.
While we’re not about to try and influence your choice of internet browser, it is always handy to know a few tricks and shortcuts that can make you more efficient. Most browsers will have a number of tools built in to make your life easier. Without doing some digging or experimenting though, you might never find out what they are!
In our offices, Chrome is up there as the most popular browser. Needless to say, we’ve figured out all the tricks and ways to make it suit exactly what we want to do.
We thought it was time we shared this with the world.
Search bar shortcuts
Did you know that you can search sites like Youtube or Wikipedia using your browser’s search bar? No need to go to the sites home page first or even search through Google. You can search a site directly by first entering the main URL for the website and then pressing ‘tab’ — then type in your search.
A few websites you can do this for include:
There’s plenty more, you’ll find some options that have been personalised to what websites you regularly use if you go to Chrome’s settings and have a look under the ‘Manage Search Engines’ tab.
You can even search your Gmail and your Google drive this way. You just need the URLs to start you off. For Gmail, it’s https://mail.google.com/mail/ca/u/0/#apps/%s for Drive the search URL is https://drive.google.com/#search/%s. Use the same process with these, pressing tab after you put in the URL and you’ve got your search shortcut!
Your Chrome search bar can also act as a calculator, punch in any equation and you’ll have the answer against an = symbol in the dropdown.
Keyboard shortcuts
There is a plethora of keyboard shortcuts you can use on a Chrome browser. We’re not going to list ALL of them here, but we will give you a few helpful samples.
Note: These shortcuts are based on an Apple keyboard but can be easily adapted to a PC (command = ctrl)
Take a screenshot — command + shift + 3
Take a selective screenshot — command + shift + 4 (press esc to quit without selecting anything to screenshot)
Logout and quit all open applications — command + shift + Q (a handy one when you’re using someone else’s computer and logged into different accounts all over the place!)
Switch between tabs — command 1–8 (numbers correspond to the tabs order, using command + 9 will take you to the last tab, regardless of how many tabs you have open)
Open a new tab — command + n
Other tidbits
You can update the information that auto-fills into all your online forms right from Chrome. Just head into settings and then ‘advanced settings’ and look for the ‘manage autofill details’ tab. This certainly makes booking flights or buying something online much less tedious when your correct details are already sitting there waiting for you.
If there’s a number of websites that you use every day, you can make your life easier by setting them to open automatically when you open Chrome. Just use your settings again, go into the tab that says ‘pages to open on startup’ and you can select specific pages to open whenever you launch the browser.
If you’ve accidentally closed a tab you really needed, never fear! You can quickly go into ‘History’ and there’s a whole list of your recently closed tabs that you can click back open.
There’s also a whole bunch of things you can do by right-clicking a tab. You can pin a tab, which makes it easier to manage a browser window with a lot of tabs open. You can also choose to close all tabs except the one you’re in or close all tabs to the right or left of that. If you’re working on a project and have lots of tabs open, you can come back to them all on another day if you right-click and select ‘bookmark all tabs’. You can create a new bookmarks folder with your tabs from that day to come back to when you need them again.
Knowing a few shortcuts to use on your favourite browser certainly helps you be more efficient in your work. Before long you are using shortcuts for all your most used tools, making your work on your browser move much faster than before. Plus, it’s always fun to have a few tricks up your sleeve to make you look really tech savvy at work!
Originally published at https://hutsix.com.au.
