Keyboard Shortcuts for Dummies

keyboard shortcuts

Sometimes we have to wonder just what was going through the minds of the freelancers we feature here at the moment they hit "publish" (or the equivalent) on their chosen platform. Did they ever wonder if someone was going to come along later and make fun of them? Or did they just envision more bucks flying into their bank accounts? Well, we're all about choice number one, especially for eHowian Vera Leigh and her ItStillWorks.com post, "How to Reduce the Size of Pages on the Web."¹

Given that the post was originally written for eHow.com in 2010, it's a fairly safe bet that Leigh correctly assumed that the OQ wanted to decrease the display size, not the storage size. You never know, though...

Vera's problems seem to be two-fold: first, she zeroed in on a single browser and second, she was constrained by Demand Media's minimum word count. Leigh managed to spit out 200-plus words, even though she could probably have answered the question in a simple, seven-word sentence: Use the keyboard shortcut CTRL- (control-minus). That control-minus keyboard shortcut is a standard pretty much across the industry (in the Apple world, it's Command-minus). Seven words, however, would not have met the MWC. Instead, Vera walked her readers through four steps, steps later illustrated by DMS with blurry screen captures. Leigh's step number one is classic eHow.com:

"Open an Internet Explorer web browser by clicking on the its [sic] icon on your computer desktop. If you do not have the Internet Explorer web browser, you can download it from the Microsoft website."

That's even though, by the time she wrote this, IE usage was already plummeting as Google Chrome® became more popular (and Firefox was holding its own). Leigh never even mentions other browsers or, for that matter, other operating systems – just IE on Windows. So much for her fellow English majors who were bragging about their iMacs...

While Vera's instructions are technically correct, they're platform- and browser-specific. That makes them pretty much useless to someone using Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera... That also makes Leigh eminently qualified to be the Dumbass of the Day. If she'd just stuck that control-minus in a tip...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_5890033_reduce-size-pages.html

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