Ten things you need to know to use your computer productively

Anything you have seen on paper or on a screen, a computer can probably do. Maybe not fast. Maybe not with the software you already have. But it can be done, and you are allowed to be the person who does it.

That is the whole point of this item. It is trust that you can. Back when I first wrote this, a lot of people treated computers as a club. If you weren’t already in it, you waited for the club to do the thing. That attitude wasted years.

You still need that trust. The machine will look more magical than it used to. The sentence on the screen may sound sure of itself. None of that changes the assignment: you can do this. Believe that first. The how comes next.

This leads to the most powerful, and liberating, concept in computing:

If I can do… then I should be able to…

There are a billion, trillion pairs. Print text… print a picture. Bold text… underline text. Send an email… send a file. And on and on. You are not starting from zero each time. You are asking the next question in a family you already know how to start.

Once you believe you can, you need the how. You do not need to carry every how in your head.

Pay attention to where answers live. Some books and pages are laid out by project. Some by topic. Some want history and theory. Some just want you to finish the step. Each is useful for a different kind of stuck. Read the title. Notice what type of help you’re holding.

Notice people the same way. Some folks give you the answer and stop. They are gold when you are in a hurry and the question is specific. Some folks give you the essay: why it works, and three other ways to get there. That is how you learn things you didn’t know you needed. It also takes time. Don’t use the essay person when you needed the one-line person.

Don’t try to know everything about everything. That will take every second of your life and you will still be unproductive. Know what you need for this job. Remember who can help with what. You will become “the person who knows X,” and people will start coming to you. Let them. Ask other people the same way.

If you listen to how computer people start a conversation, they are usually doing one of three things: asking a question, saying what they just found, or asking whether a different method would work better. That is not them being a bother. That is how the work gets shared. Ask. Don’t treat asking as an imposition.

Sometimes you don’t know the answer, and the question on the screen doesn’t make much sense either. When in doubt, press Enter.

The default action is supposed to be the safe one. That is why this rule works. The dialog may say “Delete file?” like the question is delete. Enter often answers No. The file is still there. You didn’t type “no.” You took the default, and the default was written to keep you out of trouble.

You are answering a different question than the one the heading made you hear. Read the highlighted button before you assume what Enter will do. Most of the time it is the safe road. That is the point.

Same family of joke: “Press any key.” The Enter key is the Any Key.

Block, cut, copy, and paste is probably the most important function on a computer. Combine it with Alt-Tab and you can move work instead of retyping it.

Block means mark what you are talking about. Usually: click, hold, drag until the thing you want is highlighted, then let go.

Cut removes what you blocked and puts it in a one-slot storage location — the clipboard. Copy puts it in that same slot and leaves the original where it was. Paste puts whatever is in the slot where the thing needs to be now.

One slot. Copy a second thing and the first one is gone. The contents stay in the slot after you paste, so you can put the same thing in more than one place. Just don’t copy something else in between and expect the first thing to still be there.

Hold Alt with your thumb. Tap Tab until the program you want is selected. Let go of Alt. That program comes forward.

You are almost never working in one window. Alt-Tab is how you stop pretending you are. Combine it with block, copy, and paste and you can take a thing from here and put it where it needs to be now.

In Windows 3 this was called the Cool Switch. In the configuration file — WIN.INI — it looked like CoolSwitch=1 or CoolSwitch=0. Control Panel dressed it up as “Fast Alt+Tab Switching.” The name in the file was better. Good times.

Answer the Friggen Question. Well, not exactly. You get the idea.

At any moment there is usually only one question on the screen. There is a lot of other junk. Only one question. The trick is figuring out which one it is.

If the computer beeps, does nothing, or does something “wrong,” you either answered that question with an answer it doesn’t accept — the buttons say OK or Cancel and you answer No — or you answered a different question than the one it asked. It asked what to name the file. You answered Y because you thought it asked whether you wanted to close. WordPerfect 5.x would do that to you all day.

Kids are better at this than adults. Not because they are smarter. Because they have not been trained yet to infer, imply, assume, and judge. They see the question that is actually there and they answer that one.

Treat the computer like a very stupid, very obedient child. The best thing about it is it does exactly what you tell it. The worst thing is it does exactly what you tell it.

Tell that child to go get the mail and they will walk to the box, pick up the mail, and stand in the rain. You never told them to bring it back. Make sure you checked the box that tells the kid to go back in the house.

Exact instructions. Get up. Go to the blue mailbox, third from the right. Pick up the mail. Bring it back to me. Now.

You are already giving the machine hundreds of instructions you don’t think of as instructions. When something goes “wrong,” you either don’t remember answering, or the answer is sitting on a menu hidden on a hidden menu. What you mean by wrong is: not what I wanted, and exactly what I asked for.

Software that talks in full sentences does not change this. It just makes the kid in the rain sound sure of himself. Check the box that brings him back inside.

“Invalid password” is a good example. What it is trying to say is: the username and password did not match what I have on file, so I am calling the password invalid. What you should get out of that is any of these:

• the username is typed wrong
• the password is typed wrong
• that password belongs to a different username
• that username does not exist here

“File not found” is the same kind of liar. In MS-DOS it meant: I could not find that name in the current directory or on the current path. It did not mean the file does not exist. It meant I was not told to look where the file actually is.

Read the message as a clue about what the machine checked. Not as a verdict about reality.

What is on the screen and not saved lives in a very temporary kind of memory. A power blink, a mistyped command, a program deciding it has had enough — and it is gone. It does not take long.

That loss is expensive: the work, the idea, the train of thought. Most programs will now save for you every few minutes. Turn that on. It lowers the risk. It does not remove it. If the program won’t do it for you, save before you do anything new — print, spell-check, answer the phone, switch to another program.

Saving on the same disk is not the whole job. When the drive dies, those saved files are on a piece of trash. Unless you like paying someone to fish in wreckage, you need a copy that lives somewhere else. Backups are how data survives the hardware.

The manuals are generally painful. I would not read one unless I needed to fall asleep. They tend to be written for the techs, by the techs. That said: if you cannot figure out how to do the thing, look it up. Index first. Read just that part. Sit in front of the machine so you can tell whether the paragraph actually answered you. That crappy manual is more helpful than it looks when you use it that way.

Look it up before you call a knowledgeable friend. If you skip that step, they will not stay a friend long. If that still fails, then the support line. Expect to wait. Expect it to cost something. That line is last, not first.