Navigating the Start Screen with a Keyboard
Everyone’s talking about the new touch
features in Windows 8, but you’d be surprised just how many new
keyboard shortcuts there are. We’ll get to those in a second, but for
now you should know that you can navigate the Start screen using the keyboard. Here’s how:
1. Press Tab. Windows
8 selects the user account tile. If you want to select a command from
this tile, press Spacebar, use the up and down arrow keys to select the
command, and then press Enter.
2. Press Tab again. Windows 8 selects the first app tile.
3. Use the arrow keys to select the app you want to run.
4. Press Enter. Windows 8 launches the selected app.
Besides this technique, Windows 8 also offers
a huge number of Windows Logo key–based shortcuts that enable you to
not only navigate the Windows 8 interface quickly, but also let you
easily invoke many Windows 8 features and programs. Table 1 provides the complete list.
Table 1. Keyboard Shortcuts for Navigating Windows 8
Tip
Two other keyboard shortcuts that
are important for navigating the Start screen are Ctrl+- (hyphen),
which invokes the Semantic Zoom feature, and Ctrl++ (plus), which turns
off Semantic Zoom.
