I love a good keyboard shortcut as much as the next guy; they really keep my work flow smooth and efficient. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t make the discovery process for new shortcuts very easy so every user is aware of just a small subset of all the possible combinations and subsequent results. Here is one more to add to your arsenal of keyboard weaponry.

Opening a Windows Explorer window you will notice the arrangement of data in rows and columns, like an Excel spreadsheet. Explorer isn’t the only application like that but it’s probably the most prominent and what I will be using to illustrate this shortcut. Back in Explorer, how many times have you found that the column width is just not wide enough to show the data it contains? Frequently I suspect. We’ve been trained to resize columns by hovering the mouse cursor between the column labels at the top of each application. Soon thereafter, the cursor will change shape and you can now click and slide the width larger or smaller. Common computing sense right?

The process ventures into the annoying territory when there are multiple columns containing data that just doesn’t fit in the shown width. You can either resize each column individually or you can use a lesser known keyboard shortcut that adjusts the size to fit the contents for every column – automatically!

The keyboard shortcut is CTRL and + (the plus sign on the number pad)

Your columns are instantly resized to display all the data in the row, which can be quite useful for many!

One thing of note, the keyboard shortcut only works on keyboards that include the number pad – meaning a traditional laptop keyboard won’t cut it.