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Working with shortcuts is a wonderful method to save time in any computer program and QuickBooks is no exception. There are a number of shortcuts and tricks that I'd like to share with you in this particular video. First, let's start in our checkbook area. You will notice that in my check, I have it as a yellow color. However, if I go to my bank account on top and I switch to another bank, you will note that the color of my check changes in the background. This is a wonderful way to stay on target with knowing you're making your entries to the proper account and it's very simple to do. We'll simply go to the edit menu and under edit, go down to change account color. Now, you can use one of the basic colors or, if you'd like, hit define color and you can choose to make any color that you would like to in the background. I'll simply add a color to my custom colors and say ok. When I do, notice that I have a softer green. If I go to switch bank accounts and go to my checking account, you'll notice I have yellow; if I go to my company savings account, a darker green. Now, the nice part of this is if I go to a register, my register will be color coded. I'll close out of our first register, switch over to our company checking account, back to our register. Notice it stays in yellow. This is a wonderful way to insure that your transactions are going to the correct checking account. Now, another item that I'd like to talk about in our checks is keyboard shortcuts for moving around. When we move into a particular item, you'll notice that we have the dates on our screen. Let's say, for instance, that I have an incorrect period that's listed on this check or I'm actually not going to write my check on the 31 of December. If I'd like to switch my check date, I can simply hit the plus sign on my keyboard and you'll notice it's going up one date at a time. If I hit the minus key, you'll see that it goes down one date at a time. Now, the nice part is that I can also use some words to move back and forth with these dates. Let's say, for instance, I'd like to move to the beginning of the week or the end of the week. If I look at the spelling of week, you'll notice w for the beginning and k for the end of the week. Now, this is going to translate into a w to move our date to the beginning of the week and a k to move our date to the end of the week. So once again, on my date I'll hit a w and you'll notice that it's moving by a week at a time. If I hit a k, it is actually going backwards one week at a time. So you will notice that I can go to the beginning of the week or the end of the week just by hitting the k or the w in the word week. I can do this same thing by using month. Once again, we have m at the beginning of the month, h at the end of the month. M for the beginning of the month, h for the end of the month. Carrying further, I can go to a year. Again with the year, back up to my date, I can go y for the beginning of the year and r for the end of the year. Each of these techniques can be used anywhere where you have a date field. That means if I go to a Profit and Loss Report, I want to change to the beginning of the year, I can simply type y and I'm at the beginning of the year, go to two, type in r for the end of the year and it moves the dates automatically. Of course, I can then toggle to the minus sign and adjust that date one day at a time. These shortcut keys are wonderful for moving around the screen. I'd like you to note also that included with this video is a listing of these shortcut keys. If you go to your CD into our Work Papers folder, you'll find that I have given us a listing of each of these individual shortcut keys. You'll notice the dates that we were just talking about are on the top and there's some quick tips that follow through on the bottom. Now, another tip I'd like to share with you is when we toggle from one program to another. I'm in Word and would like to get back to QuickBooks quite quickly. I'm simply going to go ahead, use an Alt and the Escape key and you'll notice it toggled me right back to QuickBooks. So once again, Alt and Escape will toggle me between my programs. Keep in mind also that anywhere we're at, we can move from one field to another with our Tab key. I'd like to go backwards, I'm going to hold my Shift key down and again, just toggle back where I came from. In each of the fields also, you'll notice it's common to see one letter underscored. Notice how the d in dates, the m in modified. This is throughout Windows and it is a shortcut key that is activated by hitting the Alt key. The A-l-t, or the Alt key, is usually right next to our space bar. So Alt and M will allow me to modify my report. Very often it's easier for us to use shortcut keys rather than actually using our mouse. Let's say, for instance, that I'd like to close this particular dialog box. If I hit the Escape key, it's gone. No need to touch the mouse. There are dozens of shortcut keys that are out there for QuickBooks. I've shown you just a few. Please take a moment to go through the Word document and find the ones that are most effective for you. You'll see that shortcut keys can really increase the amount of time that you have for analyzing your books, rather than for entering your books.