Q. I see people using the keyboard to cut and paste text. How do they do this?

A. There are a few keyboard shortcuts that are really useful and stop the need to lift your fingers from the keyboard and move them to a mouse. Here are shortcuts you should try out. They all involve holding down one key and pressing another, a process called a keyboard combination:

• Ctrl and S saves the document or data you are working on

• Ctrl and A highlights all the text in a document

• Ctrl and C copies text you have highlighted in a document

• Ctrl and V pastes copied text to a new location, determined by where your cursor is placed

• Ctrl and X cuts highlighted text from a document

• Ctrl and P prints the document you have open

On an Apple Mac computer, the keyboard combination is cmd plus the appropriate letter. Another useful combination on a Mac is cmd and Q, which quits the open application.