International Ctrl+F Day - 18 August 2022 - this Thursday share your nerdy knowledge

I bet you know someone who'd benefit from discovering that SHIFT+ENTER lets them introduce paragraphs (and some white space) into their Facebook comments. If you do, please tell them. While you’re at it, let the world know that an underscore (_) or asterisk (*) on either side of a word in a WhatsApp message adds italics or emphasis - you can even strike out the text with a couple of tildes (~), one on each side. 

There’ll be someone in your department who knows how to store email addresses on the photocopier to save people having to enter it each time. Perhaps it’s you? If so, maybe you could leave some instructions for your grateful colleagues who have been fighting a beepy battle to scan documents and email them to themselves. (After finding out how to shush our office photocopiers’ beeps I once stayed late after work and covertly de-beeped two floors' worth of machines.) 

 

“I think I now understand what it's like to be a Jehovah's Witness. I want to knock on strangers' doors & tell them the good news of Ctrl+F.”⁽¹⁾

We all pick up useful ways of doing things on computers or other tech but, unless you sit and watch what others are doing, we don't transmit these tricks to other people very effectively. I'd always assumed that the Ctrl+F (or Command+F on a Mac) shortcut was widely known, by pretty much everyone, and I remember my amazement in August 2011 to discover that it wasn't. The keyboard shortcut is a quick route into the Edit » Find menu, available on almost any bit of office software, which lets you leap through a textual wormhole from wherever you are in a document to wherever that exact word, phrase or search 'string' appears. It doesn't matter how long the document is (200-page PDF? No problem) and works on web pages as well as Word. Using Ctrl+F boosts your search skills and saves a lot of time letting you check within seconds if something appears in a document. 

On a smartphone it’s slightly fiddlier to ‘Ctrl+F’ a word on a page. You need to pull down at the top of the page show the search bar, type in your word or phrase and then it will tell you if it appears on the page you’ve been looking at (and it’ll let you tap your way to each instance of it). Wherever you use the shortcut it’s incredibly useful. 

On 18th August 2011 Alexis Madrigal published an article⁽²⁾ in The Atlantic drawing attention to research by Google ‘search anthropologist’ Dan Russell which showed that 90 per cent of internet users didn’t know about Ctrl+F. What had they been doing instead? It turned out they’d been scrolling up and down and visually scanning to try and hunt for the word that was hiding somewhere in the text. Jaws dropped. A follow-up article⁽³⁾ a few days later considered the fallout of this momentous news and articles appeared extolling the virtues of having Ctrl+F among your search skills, as well as other useful keyboard shortcuts to save time or ‘increase productivity’. 

I’d like to suggest a kind of “International Ctrl+F Day” on 18th August, partly to mark the anniversary of nerds discovering^ that everyone else didn’t already know this tip, and partly to encourage everyone to grab the opportunity to share some small technological thing that might help others. If you feel inspired you might write a post, on Facebook or your work intranet, to tell people about Ctrl+F (or Shift+Enter) or some other useful thing that you know and (probably wrongly) thought was too obvious to share. Did you know that you can press and hold the space bar on a phone to reposition the cursor? Someone you know probably doesn’t and might be pleased to know. Tell them, on Thursday (or any day you like!). 

 

References

⁽¹⁾ https://twitter.com/JoBrodie/status/105036950360170496 

⁽²⁾ Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F (18 August 2011) by Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic 

⁽³⁾ Why Using Control+F May Be the Most Important Computing Skill (22 August 2011) by Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic  

^My surprise at finding out that most people didn't know about Ctrl+F is also matched by my sudden awareness of how poor I'd been at estimating others' digital literacy. I'd not given a moment's thought to ever mentioning Ctrl+F to anyone as I'd assumed everyone had just picked it up, as I had, by spotting it in the on-screen Edit / Find menu.