I got a new job that requires a lot of data input. Hunting and pecking is not cutting it.
I have zero experience. Can someone recommend a good, free online typing course?
I know this is not what you are asking for but for the next 14 hours or so the game “The Textorcist” is free on Epic Games.
It is mainly a game…not sure if it is even a good one…that makes you type things to advance. Maybe worth a try.
That aside and more seriously you can find typing tutors online such as: https://www.typingclub.com/
I only grabbed that out of a quick search. I have no experience with it. There are plenty of other typing tutors out there though. Also typing games.
In the end the route to proficiency is just doing it a lot. Mostly that is all these are. Throw text at you and make you type it fast. They add some assessment of your accuracy and speed so you can see your progression.
Personally I think accuracy beats speed but both matter. Concentrate on accuracy first and speed should come later as you practice.
Try Mavis Beacon - I think there are free downloads available although you can probably get it pretty cheap too.
Thanks for the suggestions.
That’s what I was going to suggest. I wasn’t sure if they were still around, but Mavis Beacon taught me to type back in the early 90’s and while I’m not as fast as the ‘really really fast typists’, I still generally considered fast. All through college, I found myself in the unfortunate position of being the ‘go to’ guy if you needed your handwritten paper typed.
The funny thing was that people would get annoyed that after typing it, I couldn’t answer the question I always got ‘did it seem okay?’ and the reply “I don’t know, I didn’t read it” doesn’t make sense except to other people like myself. I could get the words from the page to the screen without comprehending any of it.
That also meant that, while I’d usually catch spelling mistakes as I went, any grammatical issues remained. IOW, I’m not typing your final draft, you still need to proof read it (including any errors I may have made) and clean it up.
TL;DR: Check Mavis Beacon, it was a great program in the early 90’s, hopefully it still is.
I actually went to evening classes at a local college to learn to type, back in the days of manual typewriters! It’s been incredibly useful to me as I can touch-type so I have no problem looking at paper copy and typing without having to look down at what I’m doing. These days I have to proof-read afterwards as keyboards have different peculiarities - my laptop keyboard is still pretty good but my detachable keyboard has a couple of keys that are a bit bouncy so sometimes you’ll get what you’re expecting and sometimes two characters come up or none at all.
Mavis Beacon is still around although I suspect the new version is more fancy than ones I’ve seen before. I never really used it because I had already mastered touch-typing before I heard of MB, but the games and timed exercises were fun just to measure my speeds and whatnot.
For basic data entry and copy-typing, you probably don’t need to know much more than where the keys are and what to press together for capitals etc. I was much the same with a numeric keypad too, keep the same finger on the number 5 and it becomes instinctive to know where the other numbers are around it.
I learned to type using, of all things, a book for that purpose. Back in the early 1990s. It had a flip-chart type binding so you could turn to the page with the exercises you wanted, and place the book in the space above your typewriter or between your keyboard and monitor. (These were the days when both computers and typewriters were in use.)
The exercises were simple…start with the index fingers of each hand on the “bumpy” keys f (left hand) and j (right hand), respectively. Then the exercises were to type out words like “frf…frf…frf…” or “kik…kik…kik…” which were instances where the keys on your QWERTY keyboard could be typed using one finger. I guess the idea was to build muscle memory, so before long you were blindly typing, all 10 fingers, no problem.
I would be very surprised if a web search did not yield a free app that could help you do this. The idea seems very simple.
My God. I remember the teacher in my high school (early - mid 80s) saying “keep your fingers on your home row keys.”
I had a roommate in college who took typing from a stodgy teacher and again this was back in the early 80s. They had some electric typewriters but mostly manual. When a couple of the better students complained that they were stuck with the manual which were too slow he challenged them to a race.
They were on the electric and he on the manual … and he won!