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 Great for long reads or historical documents.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.

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