Slashdot Mirror
Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F
Hugh Pickens writes "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. 'I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for,' says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how they search for stuff. 'At the end I'll say to them, "Let me show one little trick here," and very often people will say, "I can't believe I've been wasting my life!"' Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing, says Alexis Madrigal. 'I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all,' writes Madrigal. 'We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.'"
While you are at it, teach them CTRL+C (Command+C) and CTRL+V and CTRL+A. At least 25% of users have never seen any of these amazing combos in action either.
Let's not forget the ever popular CTRL-Z. I have some users who never knew that "undo" was an option let alone a keyboard shortcut. Of course, they're always surprised that CTRL-Z won't make an email they just sent come back.
Usually (even in firefox) just typing / to find something just works...
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
(it's a COMMAND + F on a Mac!)
ctrl+C -> cancel command execution
ctrl+Z -> pause command execution and send to background
ctrl+A -> ring bell, escape key for screen
what is ctrl+V for?
besides other two important keys:
ctrl+ins -> X11 copy
shift+ins -> X11 paste
You mean like Spotlight Search or searching on a page in Safari for example?
Guys, notepad strips out formatting. Isn't that what it was invented for!?!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
ctrl+alt+v also gives you the option to paste as raw text, in MS apps at least.
Me: Hey, Slashdot says 90% of people don't know what Ctrl-F does. That sounds pretty low to me.
My wife (who's in IT): Ctrl-what?
Me: Ctrl-F. You know, for searching on a page.
WIfe: Oh, yeah. Well, why would you ever use Ctrl-F when you can just hit F3?
Me: F3?
(hits F3)
Me: Oh.
http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/
I was annoyed by this too for years.
Either I just noticed recently, or Office 2010 finally addressed it.
Click Paste dropdown > Set Default Paste
This brings up a menu where you can set more sensible defaults. 99% of the time I want just the value, but you can independently set default pastes for:
Changing the last one to "Keep text only" has made Word much more usable for me.
The same or similar options are available in Excel, and of course when you *want* to keep formatting, the options are still there under "Paste Special".
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.