Economist Writing Every Day

Your Function Keys Are Cooler Than You Think
by someone who used to press F1 by mistake

Ever notice the F keys on your keyboard? F1 through F12. Sitting at the top like unused shelf space. If you’re at a computer now, take a glance. I used to think they did nothing, or at least nothing for me. Maybe experts used them. Experts who know what BIOS and DOS are.  But for me, just little space fillers with no purpose. I frequently pressed F1 by accident rather than escape. A help window would pop up, wasting half a second of my life until I closed it.

But the Fn keys (function keys) are sneaky useful. They can save you serious time. No clicking. No dragging. No fumbling with touchpad mis-clicks.

When using a web browser, F5 refreshes the web page. Windows has added the same functionality for folders too, updating recently edited files. Fast and easy. F11 changes your web browser view to full screen. Great for long reads or historical documents. F12 shows the guts of a webpage. That’s perfect if you web scrape or need to know what things are called behind the scenes. Ctrl + F4 closes a tab. Alt + F4 shuts the whole application instance down. That last one works for almost all applications.

Excel? F4 saves so much of your life. It toggles absolute cell, row, and column references. Have you ever watched someone try to click on the right spot with their touchpad and manually press the ‘$’ sign… twice? I can feel myself slowly creeping toward death as my life wastes away. Whereas pressing F4 lets you get on with your life. F12 in most Microsoft applications is ‘Save As’. No need to find the floppy disk image on that small laptop screen. PowerPoint has its own tricks—F5 begins the presentation. Shift + F5 starts it from the current slide. Not bad. And don’t forget F7! That’s the spellcheck hotkey. But now it’s been expanded to include grammar, clarity, concision, and inclusivity.

Desktop computers display the entire menu of Fn keys as if to invite you to ask ChatGPT about them. Laptops, however, make us just a tiny bit stupider by default. The function keys share space with screen brightness, volume, and Wi-Fi toggles and most laptops default to these hardware toggles rather than the Fn keys. Such controls make sense given that your environment changing is a primary advantage of laptops. You’ll probably want to change the brightness depending on where you are or what you battery life is.

The factory default settings require you to hold the newer ‘Fn’ key located in the lower left corner of your keyboard. That means that you need two hands to press F5, or that you need to awkwardly stretch your hands across the keyboard. Many users less frequently use the Fn keys, so they don’t even know that there is a problem or that their life could be brighter and faster.

Here’s the trick. Your system has settings that can flip the toggle default (or even an ‘Fn Lock’ key). The settings on my computer, for example, allow me to simply press F5 without manual acrobatics.  I use two hands if I want to make my screen dimmer (that key is shared with F5). I still have both options. But now I can easily use the one that helps me do my work rather than the one that helps me get situated at a desk. You can still change the volume by holding the ‘Fn’ key first. But your F1-F12 keys go back to doing what they were made to do.

If you work with two hands and learn the layout, then your efficiency jumps. Fast saves. Clean exits. Smarter scraping. So, flip your toggle. Make function keys the default. Use them like you mean it.

Do you know of other efficient Fn key uses? Comment below and may your externalities increase total factor productivity.