When old people ask me what I do for a living, and if I’m strapped for time, I tell them I “work on computers.” Generally, that answer is enough to satisfy their question. I was chatting to an old lady recently and when I asked her what her son’s job was, she simply replied, “computers.”

[I should clarify, that by “old” I mean someone in their 60’s and 70’s and beyond. It’s not their age really, but the world in which they grew up was one without microprocessors. I just sighted 18 devices around me that contain at least one microprocessor.]

Anyway, experiences like that illustrate the gulf of knowledge there is between advanced & novice users. It also highlights the fact that I might live in a completely different world to the person standing next to me, all because of our computer skill sets.

But most of us in the west use computers at some point in our day. A lot of us will use them for work, rest and play. And many people in the workforce will actually sit at a computer and use a web browser and/or word processor. So with all this in mind, I was quite shocked to read a an article the other day that claims 90% of users don’t know about CTRL + F (CMD + F for Mac users).

WTF?!

According to the article, Dan Russell is a search anthropologist at Google (what a job) and he has surveyed “thousands” of people on this very topic. So I conducted a survey of one (1) person on my Facebook and 100% of respondent (sic) said that he did not know what CTRL + F was for. AMAZING!

Does 90% of TheVine’s readership not know either? Or was Dan Russell purposefully surveying in statistically dim areas of America in order to push some subversive search agenda? 

Find
Do you not know what CTRL + F is for? If not, CTRL + F is the defacto key command for ‘Find’. Within a Word document, text file, PDF or on a webpage you can hit that command and find a word or a term. Try it now in your browser and search for the word ‘UNICORN’ in this post. Unicorn should be highlighted and (depending on your browser and version), you can cycle through the different instances of ‘unicorn’. OMG I’m still in a state of shock.

So if you didn’t know about Find… does that mean you didn’t know about ‘Find & Replace’ in Word, Notepad & TextEdit (Mac)? If you’ve just been schooled, then you can thank me (but mostly thank Dan Russell) for saving you hours of your life, manually skimming through large amounts of text.

To celebrate, here's a reprise of the Petticoat V5, as found in Mr Technology's post yesterday: