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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.
Except the modern office suite software has made Ctrl-V useless and annoying, copying styles that have nothing to do with your paste target and often messing it up in the process. So instead you have to either click through menus or find a far more awkward key combo to "paste without formatting."
Fundamentally people need to be taught that mindless repetitive tasks are something that the computer can do for them. That the computers are the slaves.
Everybody here is focusing keyboard commands, but that isn't the main problem. People would be almost as well served by using the "Edit... Find" GUI menu option, but don't even know about that. It's the concept of searching within the current page they need, more than the finger habits to do it a bit faster.
Guys, notepad strips out formatting. Isn't that what it was invented for!?!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Well that's an easy place to hide it. The Search box that's used to start web searches. Nice overload, Apple.
In other words, some interactions with external systems are irreversible. But this can be worked around whenever the interactions can run as a batch as opposed to interactively. For example, an e-mail client can implement undo send by holding the message in the outbox for several minutes before actually sending it.
Users who cannot grasp what "undo" does will be overwhelmed by the concepts of "batch processing" and "delayed email". Many already have enough trouble with "the trash is just another folder".
When trying to see things from the average user's perspective just have someone kick you in the balls while you're sniffing glue. That should result in a relatively accurate POV.
No, half the population is NOT necessarily below average; that's only true when there's a normal distribution.
Hint: Most people have an above-average number of legs.
Hell, most people can't tell the difference between a crookedly scanned all-image PDF and a Word document.
Then there are the clients who have shit fits when I tell them I can't make a 50 page fax that's obviously a print-out of an Excel or Word document go *bloop* into a database and that I need the actual file emailed to me otherwise I'll have to give them a data entry charge.
Yes, I've heard of OCR. I haven't heard of OCR that works well enough.
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Users who cannot grasp what "undo" does will be overwhelmed by the concepts of "batch processing" and "delayed email".
I guess this is one of the problems with the desktop metaphor in the post-paper era: people who haven't worked with paper have no reference point for the metaphors. For example, people who have never worked a desk job in the paper era don't know what an outbox is because they've never seen one.
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 worked at a newspaper and would see journalists and editors doing things like searching for words completely manually. I would say, "hey I have a very quick tip for you that will save you hours every single day for the rest of your career. In fact, it'll save much, much more time TODAY than it takes to teach it to you." and they would say "I don't have time!!! I have too much work to do!!!." Often I would just jump in and show someone how to do it, doing search and replaces in less than 10 seconds that would take them well over 30 minutes. That impressed a few people enough for them to start using it. But I found that many of them would persist in doing it manually anyway because it was just "easier." So what I discovered is that there are a lot of people who will work their fingers to the bone, unnecessarily spend hours working instead of enjoying life (these people were all salaried), even injure themselves with repetitive stress disorder, osteoarthritis, and so forth, to save the slightest mental effort involved in learning something very slightly new.
We live around 90% slouches who would rather waste thousand of hours in the future than take 10 minutes now to learn to use a piece software correctly. The same applies to touch typing, but also eating junk, shopping with a 20% APY credit, etc. High time preference leads to social decay. Now stay out of my lawn.
\u262D = \u5350
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.