l have just got a shiny new laptop, and thought i was very happy with it, until i just tried to type a post. but there is a problem, and any advice would be appreciated.
its the capslock button. say i am in the compose message box, typing away, and i need to capitalize a random word. normally i can turn the capslock on and off without a pause in typing.
but now, when i hit the capslock button, it brings up two icons in the bottom right of the screen, and most importantly removes the focus from the compose message box for about two seconds. so if i am typing and hit the capslock button, it badly interrupt the flow of the typing.
i am hoping this is an issue with certain settings, but have no idea how to go about finding and changing anything. does anybody have any advice?
Not sure what the OP is doing, but I’ve had students in the community college Microsoft Office class I teach who use caps lock like that (instead of using the shift key). In one case she had some kind of motor control problem (like Parkinson’s), but the other student just had never learned how to type. I thought it was strange and tried to help them understand the shift key.
Now another question - they all seem to want to use the NumLock key and the numeric keypad (on a full size keyboard) to type in any numbers. No one seems to know that the numbers also exist above QWERTY keys.
Hunt&Peckers and CellphoneThumbTypists are two distinct segments of the population who I see using computers at the library. Neither of them seem to understand the concept of a shift key. They seem to think that they can hit shift first, THEN the key they want to capitalize, or hit capslock and that it will only capitalize one letter and automatically turn off.
It is a *huge *PITA to try and explain the differences between computer and cellphone keyboards, or to teach the hunt&pecks to press more than one key at a time.
As for the numbers above the keyboard, I really don’t like them. I much prefer the numeric pad on the side, and in fact, paid nearly $100 more for a laptop than I otherwise would have because I wasn’t willing to get one without that numberpad on the side. I find that when doing a lot of numeric entry, the line-up is just way too awkward and slow.
I have never in my life, not even once, ever heard of or been told about the fact that you can use the shift key to capitalize letters. Its never even happened accidentally, sure why would it, capslock has always worked fine for me.
What did you think those two shift keys were for? Were you aware that you need to use them to get the symbols above the top row of numbers? Caps Lock will not get you to those.
On my current keyboard I have disabled Caps Lock, because it is such a pain if you hit it by accident. I would have preferred to have it act like the shift key but I could not figure out a way to do that, so now it just does nothing.
My old BBC microcomputer used to have a Shift Lock key as well as Caps Lock. It was quite useful for LISP programming, but not much else. For BBC BASIC programming you really needed Caps Lock though.