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Technology Thursday
A friend of mine is, in his spare time, playing with an online typing course. He types well and reasonably quickly, but uses only 3-5 fingers total. Touch-typing with all 10 fingers is faster, once you learn how. Not to mention that touch-typing means you don't have to look at the keyboard while you type-an very useful skill in all sorts of circumstances. So I got to thinking about other basic keyboard-related skills that it might be useful to brush up on and came up with three, including touch typing.
Touch Typing - As discussed above, if any part of your work or home projects involve typing, then improving your typing speed can be a big productivity booster. I taught myself to type on a manual typewriter when I was in elementary school. I had one of those typing books that stands up like an easel and worked my way through about half of it. "f f f f j j j j d d d d k k k k." I never achieved complete mastery of the number row with the "correct" fingers, but I was close enough. I took a semester of typing in junior high and then again in high school, too. I knew how to type, but those classes taught me a few tips and tricks about typesetting. And this was back in the days before ubiquitous computers and word processors - we were using real paper and ink - so I learned all about white-out, as well! I also know people who strongly recommend DVORAK keyboard layouts for even faster speed and accuracy. I haven't gone that route myself yet, as I'm a pretty speedy touch typist, but I have considered it. I think it's possible on most computers to simply reconfigure the keyboard to be in Dvorak mode. Whether QWERTY or DVORAK are your style, there are typing tutorials out there.
Boolean Operations - In a time when looking things up has evolved (or devolved) to typing things into Internet search boxes, it can be helpful to know a few logic tricks to help narrow down your search space. Google may have a super-simple homepage designed to imply that all you have to do is type a portion of your thoughts into their search box and they'll divine the rest (sometimes true!). Google makes a basic boolean search relatively straightforward on their advanced search page. And they also provide a bunch of syntactic examples of how you can use combinations of quotation marks and minus signs to narrow down your search from within the search box itself. It's true that some of the most advanced Internet search engines are good enough that you may not need to do much tailoring. But Boolean operations show up elsewhere too. I create smart playlists in my iTunes library where I may want things like "all albums by X except for their holiday album" and so on. Knowing how to employ grouping, "and"s and "or"s wherever you may be doing searches or queries can be quite handy and in some cases save a lot of time.
Keyboard Shortcuts - Know the keyboard shortcuts for your most common tasks in your most commonly-used programs. I have watched someone who didn't even know the very simple Ctrl-C (for Copy) and Ctrl-V (for Paste) trying to do some work in something like Microsoft Word, and it was excruciating. Constantly moving your hand to your mouse to select options from a drop down menu at the top of your screen will really slow you down. Many programs will tell you what the keyboard shortcut is right in the drop-down menu itself. Figure out what, say, 4 of your most common operations are, and learn the shortcuts for those. Repeat until you never have to use the mouse at all. (True confession: I'm nowhere near that point.) One of my favorite tricks that I'm often surprised to learn that people don't know is to use Alt-Tab (Command-Tab on the Mac) to flip between applications. Try it!
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