You do not need to spend money to improve productivity on your Macintosh: you can do it easily by following a few simple Mac keyboard shortcuts. Memorise two or three of these and you will work much faster and impress friends with your computer savvy.
With keyboard shortcuts, you press a combination of keys and your computer executes a menu command. Cutting, copying and pasting is a good example. One would normally go to the edit menu and select one of these actions.
But if you press the command key (the two keys that have the apple symbol on them that are located on either side of the space bar) and the X key, you will hear an odd vroop sound and the selected item will be cut from your work. Press the apple and the V key and you will hear a pfsst sound and the previously cut item will be deposited wherever the cursor is resting. For some reason, copying (apple C) does not make any sound at all. So that's apple X, apple C, and apple V for cutting, copying and pasting. Practise them for a day and they are yours for life.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of keyboard time-savers. Below are a few of the most valuable for increasing productivity and getting out of scrapes.
For speed demons, note that each application - as well as the Finder and the Dock - have shortcuts that can enhance your productivity. Within an application, the shortcuts can be found listed in the bar menus to the right of each menu item. The most used are apple S for saving, apple P for printing, apple O for opening an existing document and apple N for starting a new one.
For editing, the most useful shortcuts are apple Z for undoing what you just did and apple A for selecting everything in your document. Other favourites are apple F for activating the Find-and-Replace function of the application you are in, and Option apple L for activating the spell-checker. If you use bold letters frequently, memorise apple B. That takes any selected type and bolds it.
In the Finder (or the desktop), the handiest shortcuts are holding the shift key while selecting multiple consecutive items (which selects a consecutive group) or holding the apple key down while selecting so-called noncontiguous items (which selects a noncontiguous group). This works in many applications as well. Want to delete half of your e-mail? These are the tricks that save you a lot of time.