QuickBooks Desktop Keyboard Shortcuts and the French Guide's Date-Key Mix-Up

A question posted in French to the QuickBooks Community asked for the complete keyboard shortcut list in QuickBooks Desktop. The reply the forum marked as the solution is the vendor’s own reference guide. It is a good answer, and it spans seven areas of the program. One corner of it carries a trap, though, and we want it on the record before you memorize anything.

The accepted answer and its one trap

The accepted solution is credited to Intuit. It groups the shortcuts into seven areas: navigation, data fields, date fields, forms and transactions, lists, new tasks, and opening or closing the program. A short note in the guide explains the underlined letters you see on buttons and labels. Each one is a shortcut: hold Alt, press the underlined letter, and the control fires.

Which date keys actually work?

The French-Canadian rendering of the guide assigns J to today and O to the first day of the year. It also hands M to the first day of the week and L to the first of the month. The English reference uses different letters, and those are the ones English editions answer to. T jumps to today. W and K bound the week. M and H bound the month. Y and R bound the year. If J did nothing when you tried it, this mismatch is the reason. We list the English set in the table below.

The brackets hop by weeks; the semicolon and apostrophe hop by months. Alt with the down arrow opens the calendar when you would rather click.

Navigation

That F2 window is a handy first stop when something misbehaves: edition, license number, and file location in one place.

Data entry fields

These apply to ordinary entry fields on a form, not to date fields. Dates have their own grammar, covered above.

Forms and transactions

Line copy arrived in the 2018 release, so an older install will ignore that last one.

Lists

The customer center, account registers, and the item list all honor these.

Starting a task from anywhere

Some keys work no matter which window is open. Ctrl + I starts an invoice. Ctrl + W opens the check writing window. Ctrl + R pulls up an account register. Ctrl + Q builds a QuickReport on a selected name or entry, and Ctrl + M memorizes the open transaction. That is the point the guide makes in its own framing: invoices and window hops without the menus.

Startup and shutdown

The last group covers the moments before your file opens. In the window that lists recent company files, the arrow keys move the selection and Ctrl + O opens the highlighted file. Alt + F4 closes QuickBooks afterward, as it closes any Windows program.

Details worth remembering

Click into a date field before using the date letters; they only work there. Plus and minus mean different things in different places. In an amount field they raise or lower the number, and in a date field they step one day at a time. The underlined letters remain the quiet workhorse of the set: Alt plus the letter, and the button runs.