Chessbase Light 2009 – create custom shortcuts

I use Chessbase Light for creating diagrams for this blog. Certain operations, such as copying a diagram to later paste it into Windows Live Writer, need to be done a repeatedly. Just yesterday I learned how to create custom shortcuts for operations that currently don’t have any shortcuts assigned to them. Once you have a game window open, pick Tools->Customize menu item (not a very good label since shortcuts is the only thing it lets you customize, calling it “Custom Shortcuts” would make it more discoverable…).

The UI looks self explanatory, but you need to put the cursor into the “Input new shortcut” before it lets you assign a new shortcut – something that drove me a bit crazy before I realized it. The list of commands is a bit different if you do this in the “Database Window”.

Anyway, this is cool because this can save me time for creating blog entries. Also, there are some features in this long list (look at the scrollbar!)  that I never realized exist. Again, so much for the discoverability. Turns out you can “Generate Repertoire – Scan the database for games of your repertoire and generate the report”, a feature for which I have never seen a menu item in the UI! You do have an opening repertoire database, don’t you?