Morning all, I thought I'd share some tips which I hope are helpful.
Today's the anniversary of me finding out that 90% of internet users don't use Ctrl+F to find a word or phrase on the page. I was absolutely amazed to learn this and so take any opportunity to share this fact, and others, with everyone. Up to and including inventing a special day for doing so :)
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If you know how to add an email address to the work photocopiers tell your colleagues and save everyone some beeping (from both copier and staff members probably).
Here are some hopefully useful tips, please share these, or your own, with your friends, family and colleagues.
1. Ctrl+F
Hold down the Ctrl key and then the F key (on a Mac it's Command+F). This will bring up a search bar - type in a word or phase (or even just part of a word) and see where it appears in the document. This works in Word, PDFs, web browsers - almost anything. It's the keyboard shortcut for Edit » Find. It also works in Excel but you need to use the little drop down arrow that appears to select 'Workbook' if you want to search all sheets and not just the one you're in.
On Firefox you can type /, on an iPhone you can pull down to display the address bar, type a word and it will tell you how often the word appears on the page (then you can tap to visit each instance). On an Android phone it's the three dots menu and Find in page.
An article published in The Atlantic on 18 Aug 2011 announced to the world that 90 per cent of internet users don't know the Ctrl+F shortcut and end up spending more time looking for stuff https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/ and https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/why-using-control-f-may-be-the-most-important-computing-skill/243947/ - learning that most people hadn't picked this up is what inspired me to try and invent a day of tech-tip-sharing 😉
2. Ctrl+Shift+T (Command+Shift+T for Mac users)
This will re-open that last tab you just closed but didn't mean to.
3. SHIFT+ENTER
When you reply to a Facebook comment if you press ENTER you send the comment. If you press SHIFT+ENTER you move the cursor to a new line. Repeat that process and you've created a paragraph, much easier to read! When you are writing a post on your own wall you can use ENTER normally (it acts as a 'create new line' button and you need to click the blue Post button to share).
4. Spacebar on your phone
Press and hold and you should be able to move the cursor by dragging it around the screen to wherever you want to position it. I only found this out a couple of years ago and it's made things a lot easier!
5. Check links when sharing
It's easy to copy and share an interesting link but you can probably prune out quite a lot of 'cruft' before you do. For example all the 'utm' parameters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters) can be safely removed, and check if there's a geohash (which can give away your address in latitude and longitude).
6. Avoiding seeing people's Twitter likes
Use the starburst / sparkle icon at the top of the timeline to swap from 'Home' (which is Twitter's algorithmically created experience that shares what others are liking and suggests topics) to 'Latest Tweets' which is the reverse chronological timeline with much less annoyance.
7. WhatsApp - italics, bold, strikethrough
Put an asterisk either side of a word, like this* and it will be bolded. Underscore will italicise a word and the tilde will ~strikethrough~ the text. You can also use SHIFT+ENTER here too.
8. For Zoom screen-sharers
If you spend a few minutes testing in a meeting with just you in it you can reposition and resize the portion of your screen (that you'll share in a meeting) so that you can run a presentation in Presenter Mode but only share the slide part of the screen with your audience. You can see the presenter notes and the slide that's coming next, your audience can't. Play around with the Advanced » Portion of screen options.
[Normally if giving an in-person talk the projector splits things so the audience sees only the slides and you get a different view, this doesn't work when you're sharing a screen via Zoom but this workaround works.]
9. Archive.ph
If you open a web page using archive.ph and select a bit of text then the link in the address bar changes and you can direct people to a particular part of an article, e.g. https://archive.ph/N11Ho#selection-983.0-983.48
10. Cached copies of web pages
Next to almost every page that turns up in a search on Google has three small dots next to it. You may find on clicking that there is an older copy (cache) of the web page there. This can be useful if the page has been taken down, but not all pages are cached. Another possibility is to enter the link into archive.org which is the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine - you can use this to look at old copies of websites, a snapshot from history.
Jo