Tip of the week # 549
20 August 2018


Close the active program without using your mouse *

If, like me, you prefer to use your keyboard rather than your mouse you might know - or want to know - that Microsoft introduced "KeyTips" in Office 2007, offering a quick way to select commands using your keyboard. One of the favourite KeyTips of my dear friend Danijela is ALT, F, X which will select the Exit command from the File tab.

Here's how:

  1. Press ALT, F, X. (Or press ALT + F4.)
  2. When prompted, type the underlined letter s (Save) or n (Don't Save) or press the ESC key to cancel the operation.

This will close down the whole application, not just the active document, as described in tip 272.

I'll update the shortcut archive (inc/shortcut_archive.pdf) but in the meantime a big thank you to Dani for this week's tip inspiration!

Related tips:

  1. Tip # 220: Selecting commands without using your mouse ( tip_220.php )
  2. Tip # 272: Close a window without clicking in the upper-right corner ( tip_272.php )

That's it for this week! If there are topics that you'd like to see covered


* Unless stated otherwise, these tips were written for Microsoft Office 2010.