This is also common among progamers, for similar reasons: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/glSiSoAounY/maxresdefault.jpg
Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)
171–180 of 219 posts
Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)
#172OMG! This is genius!, how have i never thought of this before! I bet the people removing caps lock, scroll lock, insert etc are doing it because of the "cleaning ladies"! Not because they accidentally hit the keys. But because in most offices, keyboards are swiped clean daily by cleaning crews and when you arrive each morning you find an assortment of those keys toggled on or off. (I have even locked my Windows accou…
What country are you operating out of? I've never heard of cleaning people doing this in offices in the US.
I'm in Portugal. When I worked in London (UK) it was the same.
Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind there's evolutionary momentum at work here, too. The standard uses of F1 and F2 especially that are at play in the discussion here date back to some of the earliest PC tools. Volkswriter supposedly used F1 for help as far back as 1982, and it was standardized in the 1987 IBM Common User Access guidelines (which also standardized things like F5 for Refresh before web browsers burnt that shortcut in all ou…
They could have acknowledged that F1 is "help" and really slow / annoying, so putting a much useful function onto F2 was probably a bad idea. They could have put what F2 did onto a different shortcut. For instance, they could make F2 something that was infrequently useful and unintrusive, then made F3 do what F2 did. So if you mispress, you don't do the even worse F1 thing.
One thing to keep in mind is that some of these shortcut keys predated the modern AT-style keyboard with the function keys across the top. They were introduced way back in the day of the original PC keyboard with function keys in two columns at the left. F1 and F2 were side by side at the top of these columns, and they were very easy to distinguish from each other and hit reliably. F2 was just about the easiest function key for a touch typist to hit.
Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)
#174Windows help and Windows troubeshooter are among the two most useless things in the OS (and lately it's Cortana). It far easier and more relevant to just do a Google search than waste time with these things. Same goes for answers.microsoft.com, whenever i see that link on top og Google results I'm pretty sure I'll just waste 10 minutes of my life and then search for the same thing on Stackexchange and pray to god som…
Office has a zillion features buried in various menus and panels. The help feature has been pretty reliable when I need to find something that I know is in there.
OSX makes these interfaces somewhat usable by providing a keyboard-driven filter for all menu items. Microsoft should copy this feature.
Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)
#175The real problem is slow help popup. Everybody wants to do help in a browser now, so pressing F1 probably means a slow browser launch. (Not sure about this; I use LibreOffice only.) Just fix Excel so that a second press of F1 makes the help screen go away, even if the browser is still launching.
This is 99% of the way to a correct solution. But I think it would be better if pressing Escape would dismiss the help screen, rather than another press of F1, so that the few people who intent to use help don't accidentally dismiss it.
But nitpicks aside, this is the correct solution, because it captures the core insight: the user should never fear pressing the wrong key. The ultimate irony in violating this rule is when you've conditioned your users that the most dangerous thing they can do is ask for help.
Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Office has a zillion features buried in various menus and panels. The help feature has been pretty reliable when I need to find something that I know is in there.
Surely you're kidding right? I have never once found an answer in an F1 help in a Microsoft product. And I've been using Windows since 3.0. On a somewhat related note: Before wiki's, google, and stackoverflow became the norm, I used to love downloading CHM (compiled help files) references for HTML 3.x, Javascript, C/C++, and more.
My recollection is that help on visual studio and the old SQL server tool used to be excellent until they moved it online.
Then it became uselessly slow.
Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)
#177Okay for those that do not get it. 1. It’s a bank. 2. Banks lock down their computers. 3. So you cannot install other software to fix this in software. 4. You do not have access to the system low enough to rename / remove the winhelp.exe crap. 5. No 3rd party hardware is allowed in the bank. So no bringing your own keyboard. All the time we get into this threads on HN where the techie goes well you could just...bla b…
Former banker, and to this day I remove the F1 key from my keyboards because I still use excel heavily. Never really crossed my mind to remove winhelp.exe or anything else. This was a simple solution to a simple problem, didn't need anything more complicated.
And if I ever need to access the help function, I'd just stick a pen in the socket and hit the membrane.
Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)
#178My HP work laptop has the home key next to a smaller backspace. Very frustrating.
Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)
#179I removed capslock from my keyboard whilst in a previous job cause I never needed it and, worse, kept hitting it instead of tab accidentally. Not using Excell, just coding on a Linux workstation.
Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, yeah, why would you? You can easily delete a word at a time and then type in what you wanted instead.
cw is shorter than dwi?
‘cw’ isn't overwrite, ‘cw’ is change word. ‘R’ is overwrite. I use ‘r’ sometimes, mostly for things like ‘yypfxry’, but I can't remember the last time I used ‘R’.