This post outlines how to create a Keyboard Shortcut for a Desktop Shortcut or any other file on your Windows Computer. The procedure outlined here applies for all Windows Versions including Windows 8, Windows 7, Vista, XP, etc. This way of defining a keyboard shortcut gives you a global keyboard shortcut or in other words, this keyboard shortcut will work irrespective of the application or window under focus. However if you are using a full screen game or any other Direct X Application (playing in full screen mode), this way of defining keyboard shortcut will not work.

Keyboard Shortcut for Windows using Desktop Shortcut Properties

In order to define a system wide or global keyboard shortcut, right click on the shortcut and click on the properties menu option. The properties of a desktop shortcut are as displayed above and out of all the tabs, you would need to navigate to the Shortcut tab and look for the field labelled Shortcut Key. The Shortcut Key field will be empty by default for a new Shortcut. Click with Mouse in the Edit Box near Shortcut Key and Windows will automatically add Ctrl + Alt to your letter. In the screenshot above, author pressed the letter H and windows automatically defined Ctrl + Alt + H as the global keyboard shortcut to launch the shortcut and hence the application pointed by the shortcut.

In order to remove or delete the Keyboard Shortcut, you can press the Backspace key on Keyboard with focus on the Shortcut Key edit box, alternatively you can delete the keyboard shortcut and then onwards the keyboard shortcut defined will not automatically launch the software. Windows adds Ctrl + Alt automatically to avoid any possible keyboard shortcut duplicacy. In case you would like to define keyboard shortcuts without Ctrl + Alt like function keys to launch any software or open any document, you can use the Keyboard Shortcut Software utility which presents a graphical user interface and gives you flexibility to define Keyboard Shortcuts with any of none modifier keys.