Tablets and cell phones may outnumber laptops and PCs under the Christmas tree every season, but Macs and PCs have been around far longer. So they’re far more mature—and have been saddled with far more features over the years.
That’s too bad for anyone who likes life simple.
But it’s good news for people who write books about how to figure it all out.
Why you should never turn off your laptop
Every day, several times a day, hundreds of thousands of people finish using their laptops—by shutting them down. And they shouldn’t.
As it turns out, life is short. Fully shutting down a laptop means waiting—for the files and windows and programs to close. When you turn it on next time, you wait again—for the laptop to start up. And then you have to reopen the files and windows and programs you were working on.
Instead, each time a work session is over, just close the lid.
Closing the lid puts the laptop into Sleep mode. It’s quiet; it’s still; it’s dark. It’s using only a tiny trickle of power—enough to last for days. But when you open the lid to wake the laptop the next time, you’re instantly right back to what you were doing. No quitting, waiting, reopening, waiting.
So if closing the lid is the best way to stop working, why does every laptop even have commands called Shut Down and Restart?
Because you should shut down all the way if you won’t be using the laptop for a few days. And you should restart the computer from time to time, because the start-up process involves various system checks.
But for during the week, your “My work is done here” ritual should involve just closing the lid.
If in doubt, right-click
If you already know about right-clicking, congratulations! You’re a power user. Skip ahead.
But Microsoft’s research shows that a huge percentage of computer users don’t know anything about right-clicking. So here’s a refresher.
On both Mac and Windows, thousands of useful functions are hidden in shortcut menus—menus that pop out of something on the screen, like this one from the Recycle Bin:
It’s important to know about shortcut menus. Often, the thing you want to do is available only in a shortcut menu.
So here’s the drill:
• Windows: If you have a mouse, click the right mouse button. If you have a laptop, the trackpad probably has two areas on it—one for regular-clicking and the other for right-clicking. Or maybe it has a dedicated clicky button for right-clicking. Different laptops offer different methods (see here).
• Mac: If you have a trackpad, you can right-click by clicking with two fingers. (There are other ways, too, but that’s the simplest.)
If you have an Apple mouse, it may appear to have only one button—but it actually has a secret right-click mouse button. It doesn’t work unless you ask for it.
To do that, open the 
menu and choose System Prefeences. Click Mouse. There, in all their splendor, are the options that control your mouse.
Turn on “Secondary click.” (It’s not called “right click” because left-handers might prefer to reverse the right and left functions. If you’re a leftie, you can use the pop-up menu to specify that the left button is the “right-click.”)
From now on, even though there aren’t two visible mouse buttons, your mouse does, in fact, register a left-click or a right-click depending on which side of the mouse you push down.
On any kind of Mac, here’s a backup plan: You can also right-click by holding down the Control key—bottom row—as you click the mouse on your target.
Now you’re set. Next time you want to delete a photo, get a synonym for a selected word, create a new folder, or manipulate something on the screen in some other way, remember: Right-clicking is probably the answer.
The universal “Oops” key
You might already realize that there’s an Undo command in almost every program. Use it when you’ve pasted the wrong thing, when you’ve deleted something accidentally, when you’ve changed your mind about renaming something.
Learn, then, if you haven’t already, the Undo keystroke, which is Control+Z (on Windows) or 
-Z (on the Mac). It takes back the last thing you did. It often works even when you can’t imagine that it would—say, when you’ve put something into the Trash or Recycle Bin or you’ve closed a Web browser window that you now want back.
Learn it. Use it. In time, it will become so reflexive that you’ll find yourself using it in everyday life—even when you knock over a cup of coffee.
(No grief about how obvious and universally known this point is, either. There are people who don’t know about the Undo keystroke, and their lives have just been changed.)
The universal “Yes” and “No” keys
Remember: The Golden Rule for Maximum Productivity says, “Keep your hands on the keyboard.” Every time you reach for the mouse, you interrupt your flow of genius.
That’s why you should learn the “Yes” and “No” keys on your keyboard, otherwise known as the Enter key (right side) and Esc key (top left).
Pressing Enter is the same thing as clicking the most prominent button in any message on the screen, like OK, Save, Print, or Search. You always know which button that is, because it has a special border or color, like the ones shown at the top of the next page:
The Esc key is short for “Escape”—and it says no to any message or dialog box. It means “Close this” or “Cancel this.” In the dialog boxes shown above, pressing the Esc key would “click” the Cancel buttons. This key also closes a menu you’ve opened (including the Start menu in Windows). And it makes a full-screen YouTube video shrink back down to regular size.
Once you’ve Entered the world of keyboard efficiency, there’s no Esc.
Don’t drag the mouse across text to select it
When you’re trying to highlight some text—so that you can make it bold, or copy it, or delete it—don’t bother dragging your mouse sideways across it. That’s a frustrating, imprecise, slow way of going about it.
Unless you’re paid by the hour, you should use these tricks instead:
• Select one word by double-clicking it. No matter which program you’re using—even if you’re on a phone or tablet—that one word is neatly highlighted.
• Select more than one word by double-clicking the first one. Then, with the mouse button still down on the second click, drag sideways. You select the text in one-word chunks.
• Triple-click to select one paragraph. Quick and tidy.
Don’t delete selected text before typing something new
Whenever you highlight some text (in an e-mail, an outgoing text message, or a word processor, for example), you can type right over it.
You don’t have to delete it first.
This trick works especially well in your Web browser. You click in the address bar so that you can type in the new address, right? And the address changes color to indicate that you’ve highlighted it.
Your instinct might now lead you to press the Delete or Backspace keys—but that’s a waste of calories. Just start typing. Whether you’re on a computer, phone, or tablet, your machine knows that you mean to replace the highlighted text.
Nothing’s gone until you take out the trash
Every year, certain people run out of space on their hard drives, despite having practically no files. It’s because over the years, they’ve put 79 gigabytes’ worth of stuff in the Recycle Bin or the Trash and never emptied it.
You probably know that you get rid of a file or a folder by dragging it onto the Trash icon or the Recycle Bin icon.
But that step doesn’t actually delete anything. You still have to empty the Trash or Recycle Bin.
To do that, right-click the Trash icon (or the Recycle Bin), as described here. From the shortcut menu, choose Empty Trash (or Empty Recycle Bin). Now that stuff is really gone.
You can resurrect deleted files
Even after you empty the Trash or the Recycle Bin, the files you put there aren’t really really gone, no matter what you read on the previous page. Technically, your computer has only marked those files’ spaces on your hard drive as “available to store new files.” It hasn’t actually erased them.
That’s good to know if you ever delete an important file, you have no backup, and you’re hysterical.
The first thing to do is stop. Don’t do any more work on your computer. If you do, you might save some files onto the hard drive in the exact spot where your freshly deleted files once sat—and at that point, the deleted files have gone to the great CompUSA in the sky.
Before then, however, you can still retrieve them. Plenty of special recovery programs, like Stellar Phoenix (for Mac and Windows), can usually bring back the dead.
Even if they fail, you still have options. You can send your computer or hard drive away to an emergency file-resurrection company like DriveSavers, where clean-room technicians can take your drive apart and use rocket-science-y techniques to recover the lost files. Those services cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, but they have a stunning record of file resurrection.
How to really delete files if you work for the CIA
The fact that deleting files doesn’t really delete them is great, because it leaves you a safety net if disaster strikes.
But it’s not so great if the files you’re trying to delete are extremely sensitive, confidential, or embarrassing. Those are files you don’t want anyone, not even professionals, to revive.
On the Mac, that’s no problem. From the Finder menu, choose the Secure Empty Trash command. The Mac doesn’t just obliterate the parking spaces around the dead file. It actually records new information over the old—random 0s and 1s. Pure static gibberish. It re-scrubs that parking space seven times, actually. Whatever was in the Trash is now deleted irrevocably, irretrievably, forever.
On a Windows PC, you can download a free program like Eraser. It does the same thing: deletes the files you never want anyone to see again and saves nonsense data on the spot where they once were.
Type-selecting to find a file
When you’re confronted by a crowded open folder on your Mac or PC, you can pluck a file out of a haystack by typing the first couple letters of its name.
Suppose that in one of your folders, there’s a photo called Twilight. Somewhere. You can’t even see it without scrolling.
But if you type twi, or maybe just tw, your computer finds that file, highlights it, and drops it at your feet.
Same thing works when you’re saving or opening a file. In this list box, you can type-select to jump to a folder. You can type pl to highlight the Places folder, for example—and then press Enter to open it.
In Windows, a second possibility awaits: You can type the same letter over and over to jump from one match to the next. For example, if you have a folder that contains documents called Cactus, Comedy, and Cuticles, you can press the C key over and over to highlight them in succession.
Select all, select some, select none
It could happen to you. There’s a list of files. You want to move, copy, or delete some of them but not all. But before you can move, copy, or delete them, you have to select them—highlight them. Obviously, you can click to select one. But how about two? How about all but two? Surely there’s a faster way.
Of course there is.
• Select a few consecutive items: If you’re looking at the contents of a window as a list, you can select several of them in a row. Click the first icon. Then, while pressing Shift, click the last one. You’ve just selected those files and all the files in between your clicks.
• Select a few nonconsecutive items: If you want to highlight only the first, third, and seventh icons in a window, for example, start by clicking icon No. 1. Then hold down the key (Mac) or the Ctrl key (Windows) as you click each of the others. Each icon darkens to show that you’ve selected it.
You can also -click or Ctrl-click a selected icon to unselect it at this point, which is great if you’ve added one by mistake.
• Select everything: To select all the icons in a window, press -A (Mac) or Ctrl+A (Windows). That’s the shortcut for the Edit
Select All command.
• Select all but a few items: Press -A or Ctrl+A to highlight all of the icons in the window. Now -click any unwanted icons to deselect them.
Shift-clicking words or numbers
The same principle of Shift-clicking also applies when you’re trying to select text—in a word processor, e-mail, a Web page, or whatever. It’s an especially important technique if you’re trying to select a lot of text, when it’s impractical to keep your mouse button down as you scroll a long way.
So here’s how it works:
Double-click the first word you want to select. (You may recall that double-clicking a word selects that entire word neatly.) Or just click once in front of it.
Now get to the last word. That may mean scrolling. In some programs, it might even mean turning the page.
Finally, press Shift as you click the last word you want to select. And presto: Everything in between is now selected. (This same trick works in spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel.)
Enjoy that little time-saving stunt, by the way. You can’t do it on a phone or tablet.
Where your lost file went
Thousands of times a year, people create new documents, save them, name them—and then never see them again. They—the files, not the people—fall into deeply nested folders somewhere.
The problem arises at the moment you choose the Save command from the File menu. At this point, the computer shows you precisely where it proposes to put your newly created document. On both Mac and Windows, that folder is usually the Documents folder—a folder that was created expressly to solve the “Where’d my file go?” problem.
(If you have Windows 8 or later, all of this is more complicated; see the tip here.)
For many people, keeping everything in Documents is a terrific suggestion. It means that you’ll always know where to look.
And how do you look in Documents?
• Mac: Documents is one of the icons in the Sidebar, the list of folders at the left side of any desktop window. Click Documents once to see what’s in it—and retrieve your lost masterpieces.
• Windows: Press 
+E to open a desktop window. Double-click the Documents folder.
If it’s too late for all that and your file is already lost—well, you can always use your Find command.
• Mac: Click the 
in the top right corner of your screen (or press -spacebar) to open the Search box. Type a few letters of what you’re looking for, either its name or words that you know are inside that file.
• Windows 8: Press the key to open TileWorld (here). Type a few letters of the file’s name or contents, and then press Enter.
• Windows 7: Click the Start menu (lower-left corner). Choose Search. Type a few letters of the file’s name or contents, and then press Enter.
In each case, you see a list of search results—one of which is the file you’re missing.
Usually.
The OneDrive (SkyDrive)
Whether you’re aware of it or not, if you have Windows 8 or later, you’re the proud owner of a OneDrive.
Before 2014, it was called the SkyDrive, which was a much more descriptive name. It’s like a hard drive in the sky—or, less poetically, on the Internet.
The OneDrive is a reliable “disk” for storing important files—and convenient, since you can open it using any kind of computer, tablet, or phone, wherever you happen to be. (You just need the OneDrive app for your kind of machine.) The OneDrive also makes a handy parking spot for files you’re trying to move from one computer to another—even files that are much too big to send by e-mail.
In Windows 8.1 and later, the OneDrive is built right in. Any time you save a file, Windows encourages you to save it into the Documents folder on your OneDrive. It’s actually a good idea, as long as there’s room on your OneDrive. (You get 15 gigabytes of storage free; you can pay to get more.)
Then again, if you spend most of your time offline, or if you don’t particularly trust Microsoft, you may prefer to store your new files right on your computer instead of on your OneDrive. In that case, you can turn off that OneDrive/SkyDrive business.
To do that, move your mouse to the top right of the screen, so that the Charms panel opens. Click Settings, then Change PC settings, then SkyDrive, then turn off “Save documents to SkyDrive by default.” That’s the end of that.
The scroll bar class you missed
Sometimes, a document is so short, you can read it in a single window. (“Noble Acts of Congress in the Twenty-First Century” comes to mind.)
The rest of the time, the text is too tall to fit your screen. You have to scroll to move through it.
If you’re an efficiency aficionado, you do that by pressing keys on the keyboard. You press the PageUp and PageDown keys, for example.
But you’ll gain more control if you learn to use the scroll bar at the right side of any long window, not to mention the satisfaction of knowing what the hell you’re doing.
The scroll bar is a miniature map of the entire document. In the middle, there’s a sliding dark rectangle or blob. Its size represents how much of the page you’re already seeing. For example, if the handle is one-quarter the height of the whole window, then one-quarter of the page is now visible.
You can operate the scroll bar in three ways. First, you can drag the handle up or down to move through the document. Second, you can click the tiny up or down arrows to scroll by one line at a time. Finally, you can click in the track above or below the handle; each time, you scroll by one screenful.
(You may sometimes see horizontal scroll bars, too. The instructions above apply to them equally well; just turn your head ninety degrees.)
The alphabetical order of numbers
Computers are supergood at sorting things. In any window full of files, you can sort files alphabetically, by date, by size, and so on. (Just click the heading you want as the sort order. A tiny triangle points up or down, helping you remember in which direction the sorting goes.)
It’s handy to know that, in alphabetical order, numbers come before letters. You can use that trick to force files or folders into any order you want.
And how do you rename a file or folder? Click once on its name, then whip the mouse away. Or, on Windows, click once on the icon, then press F2. Either way, you can now type a new name.
Flip through open programs from the keyboard
How do you switch among open programs?
If you feel that life is already too short, you should know the keystroke for that: The important one is the Alt key on Windows, or the key on Macs.
While pressing the Alt key, press Tab. A floating palette appears, bearing the icons of all running programs. Each time you press Tab again—still pressing Alt —you highlight the next icon. When you release the keys, the highlighted program jumps to the front.
If you just press Alt+Tab or -Tab briefly (instead of holding down anything), you don’t see the row of program icons; instead, you flip back to the most recent program you had opened. That’s a great way of hopping between two open programs—copying from a Web browser into an e-mail you’re writing, for example.
Flip through open documents from the keyboard
If you read the previous tip (and maybe even if you didn’t), you now know about the Alt -Tab trick. It lets you flip among open programs—from Word to Excel to your e-mail, for example.
But there’s a far lesser known trick that lets you flip among open documents in the same program. Maybe you have six Web browser windows open, or five chapters of your novel in Word, or three photos in Photoshop. Here’s the keystroke that lets you jump among them:
• Mac: While pressing , tap the ~ key (top row, next to the 1 key).
• Windows: While pressing the Ctrl key, tap the Tab key. (Works in most programs.)
Handy city!
Why there’s a wheel on your mouse
The typical Windows computer mouse has two clicker buttons—and a little turning wheel in between them.
It’s there for scrolling through a window, but it can also perform all kinds of other tricks. For example:
• Magnify or shrink the page: Press the Ctrl key as you turn the wheel.
• Zoom forward or backward through a multipage document: Press the Shift key as you turn the wheel.
• Middle-click: Click down on the wheel like a button. Yes, some mice actually have three buttons. A middle click is especially useful in Web browsers. Middle-click a link to open it in a new tab; middle-click an open tab to close it.
• Enter turbo navigation mode: Press down on the wheel and keep it down. A unique double-arrow icon appears on the screen; at this point, you can whip through a long document by moving the mouse forward or back. The farther you move from the icon, the faster you scroll.
The Space bar = Play/Stop
What’s the first thing you’d want to do after opening a music file or a movie file? Play it, of course.
That’s why, on both Mac and Windows, the Space bar plays the special role of Play/Pause button. It works in any program that can play music or video, like QuickTime Player, Final Cut, iMovie, Windows Media Player, iTunes, and so on. It also works on videos at YouTube, Vimeo, and other video Web sites—usually. See here.
Free, instant tech support on Google
This one might seem so obvious that it’s not worth the ink to print it. But thousands of people are unaware of it: Google is the world’s greatest tech-support department.
Don’t waste your time calling a company’s 800 number. Don’t bother looking on its Support pages. Don’t pay some techie to help you. Look it up on Google first!
Whatever your computer problem, somebody else has had it before. And you can find the solution with Google. Every single time!
Here are some examples of what you can type:
• page numbers won’t print in Microsoft Word
• can’t turn off gridlines in Photoshop
• how do I change ink cartridge in Canon Pixma iP7220
• Apple TV can’t connect to iPad
• how do I delete photos from galaxy s4 phone
Bonus tip: Add “solved” to your query, like this: “ipad won’t charge solved.” That way, Google will show you only the discussions where the question actually wound up answered.
Free, instant tech support on YouTube
When you’re having trouble using a feature of your technology, try your query on YouTube. Often, you get to watch a video of someone else using that feature, and you’ll realize what you’ve been doing wrong.
The magic of Dropbox
Dropbox is a free service that’s so fantastic, it should be part of everyone’s life.
To get it, go to Dropbox.com and click Install. You wind up with a magic folder on your computer desktop. Anything you put into this folder appears, within seconds, in an identical folder on each of your other computers.
And phones, and tablets. A file in your Dropbox is, in essence, in many places at once.
You can work on a project at home, then go to the office and pick right up from where you left off. You never have to send, carry, or transfer your files. They’re waiting for you on every machine you use.
And even if you have only one machine, Dropbox makes a great backup system. If anything happens to your computer, all your files are safe and waiting on Dropbox.com.
But wait, there’s more. You can share a Dropbox folder with other people—even if there are huge files inside. They can see, use, and edit your files, with permission, but without having to worry about sending or receiving them.
The free service gives you 2 gigabytes of storage. You can pay a monthly fee for far greater storage.
What the three dots mean in menu
The commands on your computer usually sit in menus, right? Those words at the top of the screen or the window—File, Edit, View, and so on.
If you click one of those menu names, you’ll notice that some commands have three dots (…) after them, and some don’t. (Typography geeks refer to that three-dot thing as an ellipsis.)
As it turns out, there’s a reason for that. A command with an ellipsis means that when you choose it, a dialog box will open before any action is carried out. The ellipsis tells you, “You can’t mess up by choosing me, because all I’m going to do is ask you further questions.” It’s an invitation to explore—and sometimes to discover—cool new functions you didn’t know you had.
Teach yourself the keyboard shortcuts
One of this book’s greatest missions is to persuade you to keep your hands on the keyboard—that learning a few choice keyboard shortcuts can save a lot of time and fiddling.
But the truth is, you’re perfectly capable of learning a few on your own. Every program you use has a built-in cheat sheet of its own keyboard shortcuts. A cheat sheet called … the menus.
Inspect these menus here, for example:
And there they are, listed down the right side: the keystroke equivalents of each menu command.
In Windows, those little notations are pretty clear. Alt means the Alt key, Ctrl means the Ctrl key. So the shortcut for Select All (in the example above at left) means “While pressing the Ctrl key, type A.”
On the Mac, the symbols that appear in the menus can be a little more cryptic. Here’s what they mean:
• No mystery when you see this symbol in a menu; the same symbol appears on the actual Mac keyboard. It’s called the Command key, and there’s one on each side of the Space bar.
• 
stands for the Shift key.
• 
refers to the Option key (also labeled Alt on some Mac keyboards). You guessed that, didn’t you?
• 
means the Caps Lock key.
• 
denotes the Control key.
• 
and 
refer to the PageUp and PageDown keys.
Now that you have this cheat sheet, you can interpret the illustration above at right. It tells you that the keyboard shortcut for Close All is --W. In other words, while pressing Option and , press the W key.
Force-quitting a stubborn program
Ordinarily, when a program starts acting up, you can fix things by quitting the program and reopening it. But what happens if the app is so botched up that you can’t even get to the Quit command? What if it’s locked up so badly that the mouse and keyboard have no effect on it?
In those situations, you want to force quit that program, which means “jettison it from the computer with brute force.”
• Mac: Press Option--Esc key. The Force Quit dialog box appears, listing all open programs. Click the name of the frozen one, and then click Force Quit.
• Windows 8 and later: Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc. The Task Manager dialog box opens. Click the stuck program’s name and then hit “End task” to close it.
• Windows 7 and earlier: Press Ctrl+Alt+Del. The Task Manager dialog box opens. Click the stuck program’s name; click the “End task” button. Click the End Now button if it appears.
In each case, the stuck program exits immediately, no matter how frozen it was. You can cheerfully reopen it and give it another shot.