The Best MMC Keyboard shortcut ever!

I was reading an internal email thread today and one of my peers mentioned he used to use a keyboard shortcut that would expand an entire tree in a management console but could not remember what the key combination was.  When I read this I too remembered there used to be a “magic” key but I had also forgotten how to do it.  Fortunately another peer knew the answer to the question.

The “magic key” is the asterisk (“ * ”) character on the numeric keypad.  If you are working in Active Directory Sites and Services and want to expand ALL the sites just click on the Sites node at the top of MMC and press “ * “ on the numeric keypad and all the sites will expand to the NTDS Settings object.  To collapse the tree just hit the minus key ( “ – “) on numeric keypad.  This also works in Active Directory Users & Computers DNS etc.

The link below contains additional MMC shortcuts.

MMC Navigation Keyboard Shortcuts
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc181576.aspx

For me this is a life-changing improvement in productivity.  How about you?