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.'"

Re:Keyboard shortcuts are for pros

[Cryacin]

You're right! Science and mathematics should be self explanatory. Skilled skim reading a document is self explanatory. (Note, if it is, you're doing it wrong) In fact, life should just be self explanatory. Everything should be so user friendly that everyone gets it.

I think the point made by the article is that schools as allegedly here to teach the non self explanatory things such as reading, writing and arithmetic, and yet the most basic computing skills are not being looked at. Some schools are doing this in an ad hoc fashion, but it is arguable today that for quite a significant portion, if not majority of people, they spend more time on the keyboard than they do with a pen in their hand. Hence, we should be teaching these basic skills.

Re:Learn your AVC's

[timeOday]

They might not know the keyboard shortcuts for copy and past, but I doubt they're erasing large chunks of text in one place only to re-type it somewhere else... at least I hope not!

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.

Re:Learn your AVC's

[Anonymous Coward]

yep, and as a left-hander they're REALLY useful, otherwise ctrl+c, ctrl+v are a reach across with the free right hand.

Although they're such established shortcuts across OSes I use, I'm finding more and more applications on Windows ignoring it or handling only ctrl+c/v in their subclassed-to-add-pretty-graphics-but-not-properly-handled interfaces.

This FUCKING SERIOUSLY ANNOYING and time consuming for many people. I finally got pissed off enough to write a fucking service that needs to mess with the kb buffer and force ctrl+ins/shift+ins as ctrl equivalents. Functions well most of the time. I'm sure there's many other people who just have to live with it.

Rant over :)

Re:Most people don't know shit

[supercrisp]

I agree. And I'm a teacher. Teaching teachers is a trying experience. That said, I know that one reason I do stupid things like what you describe is the sheer degree of overload that I'm always suffering. That makes it easy to be panicky and stupid. I'll add, too, that most universities have terrible websites and help areas that actually seem designed to make teachers freak out. At every university I've been at but one, the help and instructions available online trail the actual installed/implemented software by a few versions. Or, there are clear instructions on the page, if you can pick them out of the bad page-layout covered in marketing department mandated gimcracks and whizdiddles. At my current institution, it's a good ten seconds before crap stops flying across the home page, and moving the cursor across any page is liable to give one an epileptic seizure. Then there are the "training" session we must endure, which generally involve some sales flak using a very bad Powerpoint to pitch us some piece of crap product that would cost our students a small fortune (Turning Point technologies, I'm looking at you with your trumped-up "research" claims.).

Even people who write 10+ hrs/day

[LastDawnOfMan]

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.