Using Undo & Redo

These are two little tricks that can make using a PC so much easier.

Undo In most programs (including Microsoft Word, Excel, graphics programs, Open Office, Wordpad) there’s a feature called “undo”. As the name suggests, it “un-does” the last thing you did. So if you accidentally turned a whole load of text italic by mistake you can just select undo and it puts it back the way you wanted. Or if you’re editing a photo in PictureIt and you make an area out of focus when you meant to make it sepia you can select undo and it’ll put it back. Usually you can find undo on the edit menu at the top of the screen. There’s also often a button that looks like an curved arrow up and to the left. The easiest way (once you know it) is to simply hold ctrl on the keyboard and tap the Z key. Nearly every program that has undo uses that as a keyboard shortcut for it.

One other great feature of undo is that in a lot of programs it’ll remember the last umpteen things you’ve done. That means you can undo them one at a time, all the way back – not just the most recent thing. So if you change the font, make the text bold and colour it red and then decide it was better the way it was, tap undo three times and you’re back where you were!

Redo Not so many programs have a redo function but a lot (including the ones mentioned above) do. It “undoes the undo” or “redoes what you undid”. It might not sound that useful but here’s why it is so handy:

Say you want to compare two versions of something – for example a photo with or without a border. Add the border, then undo it. Then you can redo it, then undo to switch between the two options to compare them. See each one as many times as you like before deciding. Redo also lives on the edit menu and usually has an icon of a curved arrow up and to the right – which is normally on the toolbar next to the undo arrow. It doesn’t always have a keyboard shortcut but sometimes it’s Ctrl + Shift + Z.

Tim Wakeling is the Author of Computers One Step at a Time and Help! My Taskbar’s Vanished. He also writes a free monthly newsletter about computers for non-experts.