Here’s some stuff you should probably know… (most from David Pogue‘s columns):

Screenshots

• Especially if you’re a beginner (or an expert), it’s frequently useful to capture the image of what’s on the screen — an error message or diagram, for example.
• In Windows, PrintScreen key copies the whole screen image, as a graphic, onto your invisible Clipboard, so you can paste into an e-mail message or any other program (“This is what I’m seeing! What do I do now?!”). If you add the Alt key, you copy only the front window.
• On the Mac, press Command-Shift-3. (Command is the key with the propeller on it, next to the Space bar.) You hear a snapshot sound, and you get a graphics file on your desktop—a picture of the entire screen image.
• If you press Command-Shift-4 instead, you get a crosshair cursor; you can draw across just one portion of the screen. Or, if you now tap the Space bar, you turn the cursor into a little camera icon. You can now click on just one window or toolbar that you want to copy.
• In both cases, you can hold down the Control key to copy the image to the Clipboard instead of leaving a file on the hard drive.

E-mail

• If you get a message from your bank or eBay about a problem with your account, it’s probably a “phishing” scam. It’s a fake, designed to lure you into typing your name and password so the bad guys can have it. Delete it. If you’re concerned, visit the institution’s Web site in your browser by typing in its address (like Citibank.com) — not by clicking the link in e-mail.
• Before you pass on any amazing item you get by e-mail—Obama’s a Muslim, the bubble boy wants greeting cards, the Nieman-Marcus $400 cookie recipe — first check it out at Snopes.com, the world clearinghouse for Internet scams and rumors.
• If a blue underlined link shows up in an e-mail message, you can mouse over it without clicking to see what Web site it plans to open.
• If you get a message from someone you know that relates a horror story about being mugged in England (and needing you to wire money immediately), delete it. It’s a popular scam — even if it’s the correct e-mail address of someone you know.
• File too big to send by e-mail? Then use yousendit.com or transferbigfiles.com. You can transmit huge files, using the site as a free intermediary parking space.

Editing Text

• On your keyboard, there’s a difference between the Backspace and Del keys. Press Backspace to delete the typed character to the left of the blinking insertion-point cursor, as usual. Pressing Del, however, removes the character to its right.
• In Microsoft Word, when you paste in text from another document—say, a Web site — you may not want all the boldface, colors, fonts and other formatting from the original source. Instead of using the regular Paste command, in that case, open the Edit menu and click Paste Special. Click Unformatted Text. You’ll get just the text, without the fanciness.
• You can double-click a word to highlight it. (You don’t have to drag the mouse across it, in other words.) You can triple-click a word to select the entire paragraph.
• When you see highlighted text — in your word processor, for example, or in a Web browser address bar — you don’t have to delete it first. Just start typing.
• Sick of how Word automatically creates clickable links, boldface words, indented bulleted or numbered lists and other formatting as you type?
• The on/off switches for these features exist, but they’re well hidden. In Word 2010 (Windows), open the File menu; click Options, Proofing, AutoCorrect Options, then AutoFormat Options. On the Mac (Word 2011), open the Tools menu; click AutoCorrect, then AutoFormat As You Type.

iPhone

• You can magnify the iPhone’s screen, for ease in reading tiny type, by double-tapping with three fingers. Then pan around by dragging with three fingers.
• Of course, you first have to turn this feature on. Do that by tapping Settings, then General, then Accessibility. (On the same screen, you’ll find an option to make the text bigger in the built-in iPhone programs, which is handy in its own way.)
• Has your iPhone screen image suddenly become mysteriously enlarged? There’s nothing quite as alarming as seeing jumbo text and graphics, and nothing restores the phone to the way it’s supposed to be.
• I can’t tell you how many people trek off to the Apple Store to get their “broken” iPhones fixed. Of course, the real problem is that you’ve accidentally turned on screen zooming (described in the previous tip). Double-tap with three fingers to restore the screen magnification.
• Other Cellphones* When your phone starts ringing, you can silence it quickly by pressing any key on the sides. (It’s still ringing — you can either answer it or let it go to voicemail — but at least you’ve cut the sound.) That’s good to remember when you’re someplace where phone silence is golden: for example, at a concert, in surgery or in church.

Web

• Don’t reach for the mouse to go back to the previous Web page. Just tap the Backspace key. (Alt+left-arrow key also works for Back, and Alt+right-arrow for Forward. In this article, if you have a Mac, substitute the Option key for Alt.)
• After you type a word or phrase into a Search box, don’t click the Search button. Just press the Enter key.
• (The Enter key also works to click “Go” after you’ve typed an address, or the highlighted button, like “O.K.” or “Print,” in most dialog boxes. Yes, there are people who don’t realize that.)
• On brand-name Web sites (eBay, Facebook, Amazon and so on), click the upper-left logo to return to the site’s home page.
• At translate.google.com, you can choose languages you want to translate from and to. Then you paste in some copied text (or the address of a Web site). In a flash, the text is translated — roughly, to be sure, but at no charge.
• Who needs a dictionary? In the Google search box, type “define schadenfreude” (or whatever the word is). Press Enter.
• You can press Alt+D to highlight the Address bar at the top of your Web browser. Without touching the mouse, type the site name you want.
• You don’t have to type “http://www” into your Web browser. Just type “nytimes.com” or “dilbert.com,” for example. In Safari or Firefox, you can even omit the “.com.” In Internet Explorer, you can press Ctrl+Enter to add “.com,” or Ctrl+Shift+Enter for “.org.”
• You can tap the Space bar to scroll down by one screenful. Add the Shift key to scroll back up again. (You can also hit the Page Up/Page Down keys, if you have them.)
• When you’re filling an order form, you don’t have to slide six miles down the pop-up menu to choose your state. Instead, type the first letter to select it without the mouse. (If you get the wrong state, press the same key again. For example, press C once for California, again for Colorado and a third time for Connecticut.)
• When you get an error message — in a program, on your smartphone, on your tablet — search it on Google. You’ll find out what it means instantly.
• If you’re trying to paste some ridiculously long Web address where it would be confusing to read (or impossible to fit, as on Twitter), visit a site like Tinyurl.com or Bit.ly. These free sites convert long addresses into very compact ones.

Computers

• The Esc key (top left of the keyboard) means, “close this” or “cancel this.” It can close a menu or a dialog box, for example.
• You can duplicate a file icon (instead of moving it) if you press the Alt key as you drag it out of its window.
• You can switch among open programs by pressing Alt+Tab (or Command-Tab on the Mac). On the Mac, the much less known Command-tilde (the ~ key, upper left corner) switches among windows in a single program.

Mac Specials

• Anything you can print, you can turn into a PDF document — an amazingly convenient feature. Choose the Print command — but instead of choosing Print, click the PDF pop-up menu and choose Save as PDF.
• It’s often very useful to have a document, Web page or e-mail message read aloud to you — to “proof-listen” to it, for example, or just to listen to an article while you’re getting dressed in the morning. In the Speech pane of System Preferences, turn on “Speak selected text.” Click Set Key to choose a key combination. Pressing it makes the Mac read anything on the screen, at the rate, and in the character voice, that you’ve specified.
• When you buy something online, don’t waste paper by printing the confirmation page. Instead, choose Print, and from the PDF pop-up menu, choose “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder.” You get a beautiful PDF copy stashed in Documents, in a folder called Web Receipts.
• You can view most documents without opening a program to do it. At the desktop, highlight the icon and then tap the Space bar — a fantastic way to preview photos, but also great for Office documents, PDF files, movies, sounds and so on.
• Press Command-Delete to put a highlighted icon into the Trash.

Windows Specials

• When you want to send a file to someone, right-click its icon; from the shortcut menu, choose Send to Mail Recipient. Windows thoughtfully creates an outgoing e-mail message with the file attached. (If it’s a photo, Windows even offers to let you shrink them down to reasonable e-mailable size.)
• Ever wonder about the Windows-logo key? It sets off a host of useful functions: press it with F for Find, with D to see the desktop with all windows hidden, with L to lock the screen while you wander off to get coffee, and so on.
• You don’t have to pay for antivirus and anti-spyware software, year after year. Microsoft offers a perfectly good free security program.

Cellphones

• Searching for a signal scarfs up battery juice appallingly quickly. Turn your phone off, or put it into Airplane Mode, before you travel out of cellphone range — for example, on a plane or, for AT&T users, Manhattan and San Francisco.
• When you need the phone number, address or directions for any commercial establishment, call 800-BING-411 for an amazingly good voice-activated agent. (Thank you, Microsoft.)
• You can skip the inane 15-second voice-mail instructions when leaving a message (“To page this person, press 5”) — if you know your friend’s cellphone carrier. If it’s Verizon, press * to cut directly to the beep. AT&T or Sprint, press 1. T-Mobile, press #. (Better yet: Do the world a favor and add this trick to your own greeting: “To cut to the beep, press 1.”)
• If you travel overseas, you may return to a smartphone bill for $5,000 or more, thanks to the staggering international Internet fees. (You might not even know your phone is online — if it checks e-mail every 15 minutes, for example.) Despite many well-publicized horror stories, some people still don’t realize they should call the cellphone company before traveling to buy a special temporary overseas plan.

App Phones

• On the iPhone, the camera doesn’t snap the photo until you release the on-screen shutter button. That’s good to know if you want a steady, blur-free shot. Frame the shot with your finger on the button, then snap the photo by lifting off the screen instead of tapping it.
• On iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Palm/H.P. phones, tap the Space bar twice at the end of a sentence. You get a period, a space and a capitalized next letter, without hunting for punctuation keys.
• Also on those phones, you can type dont, wont, youre, didnt and so on. The phone adds the apostrophe to those automatically. (But you’ll have to learn the difference between it’s and its.)
• On a BlackBerry, hold a letter key down to capitalize it.

Cameras

• The half-press trick eliminates the frustrating delay when you press a pocket camera’s shutter button. Frame your shot, then half-press the shutter button. The camera beeps when it has locked focus — and that’s the time-consuming part. When pushed the rest of the way down, you snap the picture instantly. No lag.
• Your flash is useless if the subject is more than about eight feet away. Turn it off. (This means you, concertgoers and football fans.)
• If you erase photos from your memory card accidentally, you can still recover them if you haven’t used the card since. For about $30, you can download memory-card recovery programs; Google “memory card recovery” to find them.

General Tips & Hints

• You can double-click a word to highlight it in any document, e-mail or Web page.
• When you get an e-mail message from eBay or your bank, claiming that you have an account problem or a question from a buyer, it’s probably a “phishing scam” intended to trick you into typing your password. Don’t click the link in the message. If in doubt, go into your browser and type “www.ebay.com” (or whatever) manually.
• Nobody, but nobody, is going to give you half of $80 million to help them liberate the funds of a deceased millionaire…from Nigeria or anywhere else.
• You can hide all windows, revealing only what’s on the computer desktop, with one keystroke: hit the Windows key and “D” simultaneously in Windows, or press F11 on Macs (on recent Mac laptops, Command+F3; Command is the key with the cloverleaf logo). That’s great when you want examine or delete something you’ve just downloaded to the desktop, for example. Press the keystroke again to return to what you were doing.
• You can enlarge the text on any Web page. In Windows, press Ctrl and the plus or minus keys (for bigger or smaller fonts); on the Mac, it’s the Command key and plus or minus.
• You can also enlarge the entire Web page or document by pressing the Control key as you turn the wheel on top of your mouse. On the Mac, this enlarges the entire screen image.
• The number of megapixels does not determine a camera’s picture quality; that’s a marketing myth. The sensor size is far more important. (Use Google to find it. For example, search for “sensor size Nikon D90.”)
• On most cellphones, press the Send key to open up a list of recent calls. Instead of manually dialing, you can return a call by highlighting one of these calls and pressing Send again.
• When someone sends you some shocking e-mail and suggests that you pass it on, don’t. At least not until you’ve first confirmed its truth at snopes.com, the Internet’s authority on e-mailed myths. This includes get-rich schemes, Microsoft/AOL cash giveaways, and–especially lately–nutty scare-tactic messages about our Presidential candidates.
• You can tap the Space bar to scroll down on a Web page one screenful. Add the Shift key to scroll back up.
• When you’re filling in the boxes on a Web page (like City, State, Zip), you can press the Tab key to jump from box to box, rather than clicking. Add the Shift key to jump through the boxes backwards.
• You can adjust the size and position of any window on your computer. Drag the top strip to move it; drag the lower-right corner (Mac) or any edge (Windows) to resize it.
• Forcing the camera’s flash to go off prevents silhouetted, too-dark faces when you’re outdoors.
• When you’re searching for something on the Web using, say, Google, put quotes around phrases that must be searched together. For example, if you put quotes around “electric curtains,” Google won’t waste your time finding one set of Web pages containing the word “electric” and another set containing the word “curtains.”
• You can use Google to do math for you. Just type the equation, like 23*7+15/3=, and hit Enter.
• Oh, yeah: on the computer, * means “times” and / means “divided by.”
• If you can’t find some obvious command, like Delete in a photo program, try clicking using the right-side mouse button. (On the Mac, you can Control-click instead.)
• Google is also a units-of-measurement and currency converter. Type “teaspoons in 1.3 gallons,” for example, or “euros in 17 dollars.” Click Search to see the answer.
• You can open the Start menu by tapping the key with the Windows logo on it.
• You can switch from one open program to the next by pressing Alt+Tab (Windows) or Command-Tab (Mac).
• You generally can’t send someone more than a couple of full-size digital photos as an e-mail attachment; those files are too big, and they’ll bounce back to you. (Instead, use iPhoto or Picasa–photo-organizing programs that can automatically scale down photos in the process of e-mailing them.)
• Whatever technology you buy today will be obsolete soon, but you can avoid heartache by learning the cycles. New iPods come out every September. New digital cameras come out in February and October.
• Just putting something into the Trash or the Recycle Bin doesn’t actually delete it. You then have to *empty* the Trash or Recycle Bin. (Once a year, I hear about somebody whose hard drive is full, despite having practically no files. It’s because over the years, they’ve put 79 gigabytes’ worth of stuff in the Recycle Bin and never emptied it.)
• You don’t have to type “http://www” into your Web browser. Just type the remainder: “nytimes.com” or “dilbert.com,” for example. (In the Safari browser, you can even leave off the “.com” part.)
• On the iPhone, hit the Space bar twice at the end of a sentence. You get a period, a space, and a capitalized letter at the beginning of the next word.
• Come up with an automated backup system for your computer. There’s no misery quite like the sick feeling of having lost chunks of your life because you didn’t have a safety copy.

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