Make a New Document Fast with a Keyboard Shortcut

David Blatner

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Just a quickie to mention one of my favorite and most-used shortcuts — something that I find many people still don’t use. You can press Command-Option-N or Ctrl-Alt-N to create a new document quickly, without opening the New Document dialog box.

The document you get is based on the last-used setting in the Document Preset pop-up menu of the New Document dialog box. In other words, if you know you’re going to be making 10 files with the same New Document settings, just set it up once, then click the Save Preset button in the New Document dialog box and give it a name. When you click OK, you’ll get the first one. Since that was the last setting in the pop-up menu, pressing this shortcut will get you more of the same.

Easy, quick, and oh-so-helpful.

If you find yourself with a lot of document presets, note that you can also select them from the File > Document Preset menu. But that’s boring, because that just opens the New Document dialog box set up to that preset. Instead, hold down the Shift key while selecting from that menu and you’ll make the new document, bypassing the dialog box entirely.