Adults Kids Computers - Shortcuts

Tell the computer what you want with pictures. Most of the time, the program already knows what you want, and offers it to you. You tell it to do things you'll never learn or even see.

• Number one, forget your preconceived notions. If you're willing to suspend them, you will be one of the students who learns how to master a computer in minutes, as long as you agree to start from zero. Pretend that you are capable of learning three or four productive shortcuts within a minute or three, and you will indeed learn them.
• More than 95% of all your commands to the computer are by touch. You just touch what you want on the screen. Instead of you personally touching the screen for what you want, the mouse does it for you. You slide your hand while gripping the mouse, and the arrow on-screen will hover over your choices. At the point where it meets your choice, just click your left mouse once and your computer now accepts a series of complex commands that you don't have to worry about, because you need never learn them, or even see them. That's why they're called 'hotlinks,' because the little pictures are actually linked to complex commands that are executed behind the scenes. Your job is simply to click on every possible choice so that you'll know what you can do.

• When you open a program, it is very hard to screw anything up. Believe it or not, you already understand most of the little pictures on the screen (they're called 'icons'). Unlike studying a book, there's no need to even try to memorize the steps you're taking when you launch a program that's new to you. Each time you touch a different command on your screen, it is presented to your brain as a picture, and when it produces a result that is pleasing to you, it is instantly, and permanently memorized by your brain.

Think I'm kidding? Go ahead, click on any icon in the program you're using to read this if you're reading it by computer. If not, go to your computer, open any program you wish, and it's got little buttons with icons. Even if you hit the print button and a blank page comes out of your printer, you now know the button that thousands of different programs use to print whatever is on the screen. Voila. You'll never forget which the print button is, for this program, or most any other program you'll find. This releases 'clogged' memory units in your brain, allowing you to move onto another, and another, and yet another. I'm still discovering new things about MS Word after six years of using it to create four thousand files and counting. Just play with the buttons.

SUMMARY: Most of your buttons are the same buttons used by thousands of programs. Stop worrying about what you do and don't know.   The simple act of playing with buttons gives you instantly accelerated results.