Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Another Moderate Time Saver

This space here is intended for rudimentary, barely perfunctory analysis of the state of the state of Michigan as well as how I feel about things ranging from appetizers to desserts. Pretty much covering the gamut of the human condition.

In the spirit of rudimentary, it is time for another one of my computer time savers. "My" is used very liberally here because this information is documented all over the place (like cnet.com), but there is little doubt that I have far more computer-savvy readers than one of the most widely read tech and gadget websites in the world. The actual truth is that I typically find when I am given a large list of computer shortcuts, I am lucky to remember maybe one of the shortcuts, but when someone points out one shortcut of high utility, I am far more likely to remember that specific shortcut.

This one is as basic as they come, but it is a useful incremental time saver. When you're browsing (be it on Firefox, Explorer, Chrome, or Opera), hit the F6 button and look up at your address bar. It's highlighted, isn't it? If that's not way better than mousing up to the address bar and manually highlighting the address so you can type over with a new address, I don't know what is. This is one of those tiny tips that I've heard about many times in longer lists, but it never really stuck in my head until earlier this week, and since that time I have been F6 crazy. At one second per day, you'll saved yourself 6 minutes over the next year. Know what you can do with that 6 minutes? read my blog.

3 comments:

Tank said...

thank you Ken. this actually solves a few minor quibbles i had with selecting long url's to re-type.

Ken said...

Bam. Two positive thoughts on this tip in less than 12 hours. Get on the bandwagon people. F6 is the future.

Anonymous said...

My favorite computer/keyboard time saver: When navigating several windows at once (n/a to Apple users), instead of mousing to the bottom to change windows, you hold down the 'alt' key and then depress the 'tab' key. this brings up a little window which displays an icon for each of your open windows + a written explanation. The box around the icon is the window you will travel to, if you let go of 'alt' and 'tab.' You can keep moving down the line by continuing to hold 'alt', and hitting 'tab' the desired number of times to select the appropriate window. You can also go backwards (up the line) by holding down the 'shift' key while tab'ing. ENJOY!