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Keyboard shortcuts and modifier keys

  • Article

Keyboard shortcuts can speed up your work by reducing an action that would require multiple mouse-button clicks to a single keyboard shortcut. Keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Expression Blend come in the following two categories:

  • Access keys   You can use access keys to access a menu command or an area in a dialog box by pressing a specific key on the keyboard. Access keys are identified by underscores that appear in the currently selected command or dialog box.

    To use access keys, first press ALT or F10 to make the underscores appear, and then press the corresponding letter of the specific menu or dialog box item. Alternatively, you can navigate through a menu or dialog box by using the TAB key or the arrow keys. For example, if you press ALT in Expression Blend, an underline appears under the letter F in the File menu to identify it as an access key. To open a project, you could press and hold ALT, press F, and then press O.

    Access keys that appear with an underscore after you press ALT
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  • Shortcut keys   You can use shortcut keys to perform an action (such as selecting a menu command or modifying the behavior of a tool) by pressing a keyboard shortcut.

    Most keyboard shortcuts are easy to identify in the user interface of Expression Blend; they are displayed to the right of menu commands. For example, on the File menu, the Open Project menu command includes the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+O. To see the shortcut keys for a tool in the Tools panel, hover the pointer over the tool.

    Shortcut keys that appear next to menu items that have shortcuts
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For a list of keyboard shortcuts, see Keyboard shortcuts.

For more information about accessibility and features, see Accessibility at Microsoft.

Modifier keys

Some keyboard shortcuts do not have associated menu items, which means that you can't use the Expression Blend user interface to discover them. The following topics list shortcuts that modify the behavior of tools, or that modify an action, such as resizing an object: