Keyboard Shortcuts

The application has a small, deliberate set of keyboard shortcuts rather than a large one. This chapter lists all of them, explains the few that behave in a surprising way, and is equally clear about the shortcuts that do not exist — so you do not spend time looking for them.

The Full List

That is the whole of what the application itself adds. Everything else you press is your browser's own.

The Ones Worth Explaining

Opening Search

Cmd+K or Ctrl+K opens the search dropdown in the top bar and focuses the box, so you can start typing immediately. The search button carries the hint next to its label, so you do not have to remember it — the hint is always written in the Mac form, whichever computer you are on, and Ctrl+K works just as well on Windows and Linux.

Press it again while search is already open and it returns the cursor to the box.

If nothing happens when you press it, the search control is not on your top bar — which means it has not been enabled for your role. See Finding Things.

Example You are halfway through reading an order and want to check a customer's phone number. Cmd+K, type the customer's surname, press Enter on the result. You never touched the mouse.

Opening The Navigation

Cmd+M or Ctrl+M opens and closes the navigation panel.

The one thing to know: it does nothing while the left navigation is pinned open. That is intentional — a pinned navigation is already permanently visible, so there is nothing to toggle. If the shortcut seems dead, unpin the navigation first. See The Application Window.

The shortcut presses the same navigation button you would click yourself, so it works with either navigation style: it opens the left panel in applications that use one, and the tile launcher in applications that put navigation at the top. If your role does not include navigation at all, there is no button to press and the shortcut does nothing.

Esc — Two Different Jobs

Esc does two separate things depending on what is happening:

• It closes the pop-up window on top. If you have opened a record from inside another record, Esc closes only the topmost one and leaves the one underneath open. If the form in it has unsaved changes, you are asked to confirm first.
• It cancels a request that is still running. If a list is taking a long time to load and you have changed your mind, Esc stops waiting for it.

Two caveats:

• Esc only cancels a request when you press it on its own. Holding Ctrl, Shift, Alt or Cmd at the same time does nothing.
• Esc will not close the error window described in When Something Goes Wrong. That window is deliberately made hard to dismiss by accident — use its button.

Modifier-Click: Opening Things In A New Tab

Normally, clicking a link updates part of the page rather than reloading it. Hold Ctrl, Alt or Cmd while clicking and the application steps out of the way, letting your browser treat it as an ordinary link — so Ctrl+click (or Cmd+click on a Mac) opens it in a new tab.

Shift+click is the exception. It does not hand the link back to your browser, so it does not open a new window: the application keeps it and either loads the target as a full page in the same tab or opens it stacked on top of what you are looking at, depending on the link. If you want a new tab, use Ctrl+click or Cmd+click.

Modifier-click is genuinely useful:

Example You have filtered a list down to eight tickets that all need looking at. Ctrl+click each one and you have eight tabs, each on its own ticket, with your filtered list still intact in the first tab. Without the modifier, each click would have opened a pop-up over the same list.

The trade-off: the record opens as a full page rather than a pop-up, so you lose the "come straight back to where I was" behavior. Choose per situation.

Shift-Click To Select A Range

On a table, tick one row's box, then hold Shift and tick another. Everything between the two is selected as well.

This is the fastest way to select a block of rows, and it pairs naturally with sorting: sort by date, tick the first row of the range, Shift-tick the last. The range only ever adds to your selection; it never unticks anything.

Tick boxes exist on table layouts and on file lists, not on cards, boards or calendars. See Selecting Records And Bulk Actions.

Shift+click extends a range in one more place: the picker window you use to choose several files or images at once. See Uploading Files And Images.

Keyboard Inside Fields

Most fields behave the way you would expect from any web form, but a few are worth knowing:

• Star ratings are fully keyboard-operable once focused. Left and Right (or Up and Down) move by one star, 0 to 5 jump straight to a value, Home clears it, End sets the maximum, and Backspace or Delete clears it.
• Search-as-you-type pickers — the fields where you type a few letters and pick a matching record — respond to the arrow keys to move through suggestions and Enter to choose the highlighted one.
• Time fields split into separate hours, minutes and seconds boxes let the arrow keys carry you forward and back between the parts — Right at the end of a box moves to the next one, Left at the start moves back — and typing a colon jumps forward a part.
• The assistant's message box, if the assistant is turned on for your application, sends on Enter. Use Shift+Enter when you want a new line instead of sending. See The AI Assistant.

See The Fields You Will Meet for what each field expects.

Browser Shortcuts That Still Matter

These are your browser's, not the application's, but they come up daily:

Ctrl+F Versus The In-List Find Box

They sound identical and do different things:

• Your browser's find highlights text that is already rendered on screen. It does not hide anything and does not know what a record is.
• The application's box marked "Find on page...", in the filter area above a list, hides the rows that do not match, leaving the matching ones.

Neither of them searches your data. For that you need filters or the search in the top bar. See Filtering Your Data.

What Does Not Exist

Being explicit about this saves time:

• There is no keyboard shortcut to save a form. Use the Save button.
• There is no shortcut to create a new record, to delete one, or to move between records.
• There is no command palette. Cmd+K opens search over your data, not a list of commands you can run.
• There is no print support at all — no print action and no separate print layout, so Ctrl+P prints the page as it happens to look on screen. If you need something on paper or as a file, export it to a spreadsheet instead. See Action Buttons And Exporting.
• There are no shortcuts you can define yourself.

If a shortcut would genuinely speed up your work, that is a reasonable thing to raise — see What To Ask Your Administrator For.

Related Chapters

• The Application Window
• Finding Things
• Selecting Records And Bulk Actions
• Pop-Up Windows
• When Something Goes Wrong