You might not know this but the Tab key is one of the most versatile buttons on your keyboard as it has several tricks up its sleeve about which we shall talk about in this article.
<-300x250 Medium Rectangle - center->
The first thing that you can do with the Tab button is to choose items alphabetically in Finder windows. What you have to do is go into one of the Finder windows, with the exception of the Column view and you can press the Tab button for alphabetically selecting the next file.
Of course, this only works if the window has been sorted by another way than the name (Kind or Size, for example). By pressing the Tab key you can go to the next alphabetical item, while pressing Shift-Tab will direct you to the previous alphabetic file. We should mention that this is going to work also when the items have been grouped in categories with the View > Arrange By sub-menu. Pressing the Tab key will jump to a different group.In Safari you can easily navigate by just using the keyboard. If you press the Tab button it will redirect you from the address field to the browser’s search field, as well as to any other fill-in fields that are in the webpage. You should know that Safari features its proprietary setting for tabbing to other elements which are not fields. You have to access Preferences and from there go to the Advanced tab and choose the option called Press Tab To Highlight Each Item On A Webpage. You are also able to leave this off and just use the Option key when you hit the Tab key for accessing this capability temporarily.If you go to the Keyboard Preferences and activate the All Controls option which can be found in the heading called Full Keyboard Access. When it is on, at first you’ll have to activate the address field in Safari (Command-L) or the search field (Command-Option-L) for focusing its attention on the title bar. After an item has been selected, you can activate it by pressing the spacebar. After the menu has been activated, for opening it you’ll have to hit the spacebar or you can use arrow keys for highlighting an item. By pressing Return it will choose an item, while pressing the spacebar is going to close the menu without making any selections.
You will find an Outline view in Apple’s Pages ’09 as well as in Microsoft Word which gives you the possibility to collapse a long document into headings of various levels which are easier to review. When you are in Outline view, you might want to click the text cursor where you want in a heading and after that hit the Tab key in order to demote it to a lower-level heading, while pressing Shift-Tab is going to promote the heading a level up. In Adobe programs, you have the possibility of hiding tool palettes by doing a simple press of the Tab button while an additional press of the Tab key is going to bring back all of the tool palettes. We should mention that if you are in a text box, you’ll first have to hit the Esc key for deselecting it because otherwise the Tab key is going to be typed in the text.