A colleague of mine once lost one and a half hours of work when his computer froze because he forgot to save the Word document he was working on. Because he had not even done a first-time save, the program could not recover anything. Sadly, this is an all-too-common experience. I've got into the habit of saving my work every five minutes of so, which has saved my skin more times than I can recall. (The habit is so ingrained that one time I even wrote something by hand on a piece of paper, and then tried to save that!) I think one of the reasons people don't save more regularly is they don't like making a special trip to the menu bar at the top of the screen. This is where keyboard shortcuts are invaluable. It's easy to type an extra letter without breaking your flow of work. Control-S (on the Mac, Command-S) saves in every program I know. Here are a few more universal shortcuts that I hope will become second nature to you:
Ctrl-C : Copy
Ctrl-V : Paste
Ctrl-P : Print
Ctrl-W : Closes the document window
Ctrl-N : Opens a new document
Ctrl-O : Opens an existing document (via a popup dialogue box)
And here are a few common shortcuts for text selected in most word-processing programs:
Ctrl-i : italic
Ctrl-b : bold
Ctrl-u : underline
Ctrl-a : selects all text in the document
Another useful one: Pressing the Tab key when filling in forms or fields jumps you to the next field or part of the form.
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And a few more easy and really useful ones:
Ctrl-End > end of document
Ctrl-Home > start
Ctrl left or right arrow - jump to next word
(Add Shift to these to highlight from current cursor to new position.)
Alt-Tab navigate between open programs, Ctrl-Tab between open windows within a program
and often Ctrl up or dowm arrow - jump to next paragraph
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