Search the action, not the keys
The reason shortcut lists are hard to use is that they are indexed the wrong way round. You almost never sit down wanting to know what Ctrl+Shift+V does. You want to paste something without dragging a website's fonts and link colours into your document, and you have a vague memory that there is a key for it. So the search here matches on the description as well as the keys: type plain, screenshot, close, frozen, absolute and you get the entries that concern that job.
Searching by keys still works when you go the other way. Type ctrl+shift and you get everything in that program bound to a Ctrl+Shift combination, which is a reasonable way to find out what is sitting unused on your keyboard.
The five worth learning first
| Shortcut | What it does | Why it earns the memory |
|---|---|---|
| Ctrl+Shift+T / Cmd+Shift+T | Reopen the tab you just closed | Keep pressing and it walks back through your closed tabs. It has recovered more accidentally-lost work than any undo. |
| Win+Shift+S / Cmd+Shift+4 | Screenshot a region | Drag a box, get exactly the part of the screen you meant, no cropping afterwards. |
| Ctrl+Shift+Esc / Cmd+Option+Esc | Task Manager or Force Quit | Goes straight to the list of running apps instead of the security screen. |
| Ctrl+1 in Excel / Cmd+1 | Format Cells | Number formats, dates, alignment, borders, all in one dialog you would otherwise reach through three ribbon tabs. |
| Ctrl+Shift+P in VS Code | Command palette | Every command in the editor, searchable. It makes the other shortcuts optional. |
Windows and Mac keys are not a one-to-one swap
The usual advice is that Cmd replaces Ctrl, and for copy, paste and save it holds. Past that it breaks down in ways that catch out anyone switching.
Cmd+Tab on a Mac switches applications, not windows. Three open Word documents are one entry in the switcher, and moving between them is Cmd and the backtick key above Tab. Closing the last window of a Mac app with Cmd+W does not quit it; the app stays running with an empty menu bar until you press Cmd+Q. Finder has no cut: you copy with Cmd+C and then move with Cmd+Option+V, which is the shortcut Windows switchers hunt for longest. And Return renames a file in Finder while Cmd+O opens it, which is the exact reverse of Windows, where F2 renames and Return opens.
In the other direction, Mac users on Windows find that Home and End exist as real keys, that Alt+F4 closes a window rather than the whole app, and that there is no system-wide plain-text paste -- Ctrl+Shift+V works in many apps but is up to each one, whereas the Mac binding is close to universal.
Why a shortcut you were sure about does nothing
Everything listed here is a stock default binding, and defaults are the least reliable thing about shortcuts. Four common reasons a key does nothing:
- Something else grabbed it first. Screen recorders, clipboard managers and conferencing apps register global hotkeys. Whichever registered first wins, and the app you are looking at never sees the keypress.
- Function key behaviour. On laptops F1 to F12 are media keys until you hold Fn, or the other way round, depending on a firmware setting. A shortcut written as F9 may need Fn+F9.
- Keyboard layout. Bindings that use punctuation move with the layout. Ctrl+backtick, Ctrl+slash and the bracket keys land somewhere different on a non-US keyboard, and in some layouts they are unreachable without AltGr.
- Version drift. Photoshop changed the default undo behaviour, Excel changed the array-formula rules, VS Code moves bindings between releases. A shortcut from a five-year-old article may simply no longer exist.
Changing them
VS Code has the best story: Ctrl+K then Ctrl+S opens a searchable list of every binding, and you can rebind anything, including chords. Office lets you assign keys to macros and, in Word, to any command through File, Options, Customize Ribbon, Customize keyboard shortcuts. macOS has a general mechanism under System Settings, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, App Shortcuts, where you type the exact menu item text and assign a key to it -- it works for any menu item in any app, which is a genuinely useful escape hatch. Windows has no equivalent built in; you need AutoHotkey or PowerToys for anything beyond a desktop-shortcut hotkey.
One rule if you do remap: write down what you changed. A machine with a customised keyboard is a machine no colleague can sit down at, and future you will have forgotten by the time something stops working.
Questions people ask
Why is a shortcut I use every day missing?
The tables here hold stock defaults for a stock install, and they are trimmed to shortcuts that are worth looking up rather than every binding in the product. Excel alone has several hundred. If you have customised your bindings, installed an add-in, or use a non-US keyboard layout, your keys will differ from these and yours are the correct ones.
Does the Mac column mean the shortcut is different, or that there is none?
A dash means the program has no default binding for that action on that platform. The best way to check is the menu bar on a Mac, which prints each command's shortcut next to it, or the tooltip on a Windows ribbon button, which does the same.
Ctrl+Shift+V does not paste plain text for me.
It is not a system-level shortcut on Windows -- each application decides. Browsers, Slack, VS Code and most modern editors support it; Word does not, and wants Ctrl+Alt+V then U instead. The universal fallback is to paste into Notepad and copy again, which launders the formatting out.
Where do screenshots go?
On Windows, Win+PrtScn saves a PNG to Pictures\\Screenshots and Win+Shift+S puts the region on the clipboard with a notification you can click to save. On a Mac the default is the Desktop, and Cmd+Shift+5 has an Options menu where you change that to a folder of your choosing or to the clipboard.