Hi there, have you ever wished for a way that you could launch your frequently used programs without having to come in here through your start menu and search through your—sometimes exhaustingly long list of programs to find the one that you want.

Here’s an easy way to do it using hotkeys. Right click on the frequently used program and choose properties from the menu. When this window opens, under the shortcut tab, you’re going to come here to shortcut key and type in a couple of keys that you’re going to easily remember later on. I’m going to use control alt “A” because the name of the software is Audicity and it’s a free audio editing software. That’s going to help me remember the hotkey later on.

After a while, it will become like second nature to me to use that hotkey to launch the program. Tips on the signing hotkeys would be not to use something that you use frequently. For instance, I wouldn’t want to use the control “A”, because in many software programs, that selects all the text or all of the components. I wouldn’t want to use a shift “A” either because then, every time I was trying to type a capital letter “A”, Audicity would pop up.

You don’t want to use something that you’re likely to hit by accident either. So use a hotkey that has never been used for anything else and hit apply, then hit okay. We’re going to just try it out real quick. Control alt “A”; Audicity pops up just like we hoped it would. So let’s close out of this for the time being so I can show you how you can do it with an icon.

Here’s a shortcut to Foobar placed on my desktop. You can use any shortcut that you find in any folder for that matter. But let’s go down and choose properties, and like the last one though, there’s a field here that says shortcut key and I’m going to give it a shortcut of control alt “F”. I’ll hit apply then okay and to show you that it works, I’ll hit control alt “F” and that should launch Foobar.

So now that you understand how you can assign hotkeys to your programs to launch them, you can probably get rid of a lot of the clutter on your desktop by assigning hotkeys to the programs that you frequently use. That’s how you do it, bye for now.