One of the questions that people often ask me is about the keyboard equivalent of clicking on the buttons in the top right hand corner of a Window to minimise or maximise it. Well what you need to do is to access a special menu which is often called the "application control menu".

You do this by pressing alt + the spacebar. The menu drops down from the top left hand corner and gives you a number of options each with its own access key (the underlined letter) :

  • maximise (x),
  • minimise (n).

For example:

  • ALT+SPACEBAR then X, maximises the current application window;
  • ALT+SPACEBAR then R, restores the current application window to the size it was before being maximised;
  • ALT+SPACEBAR then N, minimizes the current application window.