90 Percent of US Doesn’t Know CTRL+F

90 Percent of US Doesn’t Know CTRL+F:

I was surprised when I read a recent article reporting that 90% of people don’t know how to use CTRL+F.

I don’t expect most patrons I work with to know keyboard and mouse shortcuts, but it’s obviously more widespread than that. I use shortcuts a lot, and will sometimes get stopped during a meeting or presentation and asked what the heck I just did. Which might be the best way to teach shortcuts – in context and with a demonstration*.

But of course, my first impulse when reading the article was to make a list of common and helpful shortcuts to hand out to patrons – so I added that to my to-do list. There already are lists of available shortcuts, even a list of lists, but I like BoingBoing’s approach – make a short-list limited to ten (or three) that can improve everyone’s computer experience.

So here’s what I’ve come up with so far (which are Windows-centric) – do you have any more to add to the list?

Shortcut	Description
CTRL+C	Copy highlighted text
CTRL+X	Cut highlighted text
CTRL+V	Paste highlighted text
CTRL+Z	Undo last action
CTRL+Y	Redo last undo
CTRL+P	Open print window
CTRL+F	Find on page
CTRL+H	Find and replace
Right-click	With mouse; provides useful menu on just about anything

A little more advanced shortcuts…

Shortcut	Description
CTRL+TAB	Go to next tab (in Firefox and other tab-based applications)
CTRL+SHIFT+TAB	Go to previous tab (in Firefox and other tab-based applications)
ALT+TAB	Tab through open applications
ALT+SHIFT+TAB	Tab through open applications backwards, but it’s awkward (for me) to press these keys
WindowsKey+E	Open Windows Explorer File Manager (I wouldn’t add this one to the list for patrons, but I didn’t know about it so just wanted to share it here)

Again, these are primarily for Windows, since that’s what we use in the library. I’ll work on making up a handout for patrons and post it here in case anyone else would like to use it too.

It’ll be handy for the library, but since most new devices don’t use physical keyboards, we’ll also have to learn a whole new crop of shortcuts and methods. For instance, a patron wanted to copy/paste something on her iPad, and we had to look it up on YouTube to figure it out.

via Slashdot

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*When helping patrons, I always point out the shortcut codes on the right of menus – almost everyone misses those. I tell them not to try to memorize all of them, but if they find they’re going back to the same menu item often, see if using the shortcut is easier. Of course, Office 2007′s ribbons don’t display the shortcut codes, so that has changed things.