Hidden keyboard shortcuts in Windows open Office and Linkedin

A few years ago, Microsoft tried adding a new button to its keyboards (may they rest in peace). It was called the Office Button and was used for keyboard shortcuts that opened programs like Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

It turns out that these keyboard shortcuts even exist on other keyboards, where the Office key is replaced by this combination Shift-Alternate-Control-WinPaut Thurrott writes on X (formerly Twitter) and gives the abbreviation as an example Shift-Alt-Ctrl-Win-L Which opens Linkedin in the system’s default browser. Linkedin is owned by Microsoft but is not part of the Office or Microsoft 365 service.

Other programs and services that can be opened using the Shift-alt-ctrl-win commands are Word (W), Excel (X), Powerpoint (P), Outlook (O), Teams (T), Onedrive (D), and Onenote (N) And Yammer (Y). If you don’t have the software in question installed, the web version will open instead.

Paul Thurrott claims in his post that these keyboard shortcuts are built into Windows and can’t be turned off, but The Verge reports that there’s a registry key that can be changed if you don’t want to accidentally open Linkedin when you click it. Five keys. The following command is executed when the administrator turns off keyboard shortcuts:

REG Add HKCU\Software\Classes\ms-officeapp\Shell\Open\Command /t REG_SZ /d rundll32