Saturday, August 20, 2011

The F word (Find)

According to Dan Russell, a “search anthropologist” at Google, ninety percent of people don’t know how to use Control+F or Command+F to find text in a document or on a webpage. Read all about it:

Alexis Madrigal, Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F (Atlantic, via Boing Boing)

I’ve observed that many digital naïfs don’t know that Find makes it much easier to make one’s way through a piece of writing. Digital naïfs: my name for digital natives who are “in the dark, or at least in dimly-lit rooms, when it comes to digital technology.” More in this post.

[In a document, on a webpage: that’s an interesting distinction, no? The document being a repository, and the page being a visual field, even when it’s scrolling out of view.]

comments: 1

Elaine said...

I love the FIND command! Some of the parents quoted in the book I co-authored wanted their children's names used, but others wanted the names changed. FIND made that so simple!

Another example of its utility: the day my daughter wrote of a 'flying incect' (phonics correct, spelling wrong) she used SpellCheck (which, alas, provided a visual array--her weakest area.) She quickly made a selection-- and substituted 'incest.' I had to explain that SpellCheck would not throw out a real word....told her what 'incest' meant, to her horror....and reminded her to use FIND. (I'm the one who gave her a tee-shirt that says, 'Bad spellers of the World--UNTIE!'