TechBlog

Here’s a handy trick which everyone should learn. To quickly cycle through all the windows you have on your computer, hold the Alt key and press Tab. You’ll notice it’ll bring up a windows showing you what’s open. By default, Alt + Tab will go to the window you had open prior to your current window. Holding Alt and tapping tab multiple times allows you to scroll through the list of open programs and select the one you want.If you have Aero enabled in Vista, you’ll get an even cooler view of the open apps.

For Mac users, the keycombination is Command/Apple + Tab. While this will switch between windows for you and is quite handy, so are the F9-F12 keys on your Mac. Hitting those will arrange the windows and give you a preview of what’s going on in each of them. Experiment to see which key does what.

Switching between windows this way can really increase your productivity. It’s also useful if a dialog box opened behind a window and you can’t find it because it has no spot on the taskbar.