Use Keyboard Shortcuts and Hotkeys

Background

Did you know that ShipWorks gives you the ability to use keyboard hotkeys and shortcuts to perform many of the most commonly performed tasks when shipping orders? Using keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys:

Can help you save tons of time by allowing you to just press a key or key combination to get a task done.
You can navigate the ShipWorks application much more quickly.
You can define your own hotkeys that quickly apply shipping profiles, allowing you to set a shipment’s shipping provider, packaging, weight, dimensions and more.

In this article we will take a look and how to navigate ShipWorks using your keyboard, keyboard hotkeys for commonly used functions in ShipWorks, how to define keyboard shortcuts for your shipping profiles and how to print a list of keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys.

Navigating ShipWorks

Navigate your way around the ShipWorks application by using keyboard hotkeys. For example, to load an order onto the Ship Orders screen, you could press ALT H S. Let's take a look at how to use keyboard hotkeys to navigate.

Pressing the ALT key will show you the available hotkeys.

After pressing the ALT key, you can now press 1 to download orders, press H for a list of hotkeys on the Home tab, press O to switch to the Output tab and so on. Let's press H to show the available hotkeys on the Home tab.

We now have a list of hotkeys for the buttons on the Home tab. Let's press the S key to open the Ship Orders dialog.

opening the Ship Orders dialog by pressing S on the keyboard

Commonly Used Hotkeys

We have already seen that pressing Alt H S gets you to the Ship Orders screen quickly. But did you know that there are some keys you can press once there to easily weigh your packages (when using a scale connected to ShipWorks) and to create the shipping label?

Ctrl+Shift+W - When you have a scale connected to ShipWorks, this keyboard combination will automatically import the current weight from the scale. This works on the Ship Orders screen and in the Shipping Panel.
F10 - Creates the shipping label for the selected shipment. Pressing the F10 key also creates the shipping label when using the Shipping Panel.

Ctrl+Shift+W to import the weight from a connected scale

Pressing F10 to create a shipping label

Defining Shortcuts for Shipping Profiles

When using Shipping Profiles in ShipWorks, you can define keyboard shortcuts which apply the profiles saving you mouse clicks and speeding up the shipping process. To define shortcuts for your Shipping profiles:

1. On the Manage tab, click on the Shipping Profiles button.

2. Select the profile for which you would like to define a keyboard shortcut. Then, press the Edit button.

3. Select the keyboard shortcut that you would like assigned to the Shipping Profile from the Keyboard Shortcut drop-down menu. In the below screenshot, we are setting F5 as our shortcut.

4. Click the OK button. Repeat the above steps for any Shipping Profiles that you would like to assign shortcuts.

Printing a List of Available Shortcuts and Hotkeys

If you have several Shipping Profiles configured, each with its own keyboard shortcut, it may be helpful to print a list of the shortcuts that you can easily reference. Here's how.

1. On the Manage tab, click on the Shipping Profiles button.

2. Next, click on the Print Barcodes button.

3. A list of your defined Shipping Profile shortcuts, ShipWorks defined Shortcuts and ShipWorks defined barcodes shortcuts (for use with Scan-to-Ship) will be displayed. Note that there may be multiple pages.