The Office Key is a new key that you’ll find on Microsoft keyboards. It lets you quickly launch apps like Word, but you can remap it with AutoHotkey to act as an extra modifier key or disable the app shortcuts altogether.
What Is The Office Key?
You’ll find this key on new Microsoft keyboards released after October 15th. You may have also heard of the dedicated emoji key Microsoft added along with it; both keys slot in where the right Windows key and menu key used to be, in between Right Alt and Right Control:
Out of the box, the Office key opens up the Office application and has several hotkeys to open up specific Microsoft apps. There are basic hotkeys like Office+W and Office+X to open Word and Excel, but also some more obscure ones—Office+L, Office+T, and Office+Y open up LinkedIn, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer.
The Office Key Sends Shift+Control+Alt+Windows
This is convenient, but you might think that this is a new key Microsoft created, similar to the Windows key. But Microsoft cares about backward compatibility, and inventing a whole new key would be a hassle, so it took a shortcut.
You may have heard of the “hyper” key. Hyper was an old modifier key from way back when and was used on the Space-cadet keyboard for Lisp machines. It’s practically a fossil. You won’t find it on any modern keyboard, and it isn’t supported in any current OS. But the name is cool, and it stuck around as a term for an obscure modifier key that isn’t used by any applications.
Nowadays, the Hyper key is emulated with a combination of every modifier key. On macOS, this maps to Shift+Control+Option+Command. On Windows, the Hyper key is emulated with Shift+Control+Alt+Windows.
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