Pet Please #129: Discovering a New Computer Shortcut by Accident

1b574e4c9360ca12d5d6c20bfbd7cd7543e163b20e0ac4e33d2863a872e0b039I pretend to be tech savvy.

Sure, I’m comfortable on my computer. It’s where I spend most of my time, after all. I can install blog plugins, I know a few keyboard shortcuts, and I’m pretty good at Googling answers to my questions.

But really, I’m just pretending to know what I’m doing. I can’t code. I’ve tried to learn Photoshop and just can’t figure it out. I’m sure I’ve barely tapped into the full functionality of my iPhone.

Every now and then, though, I do something by accident that teaches me a new skill, and IT IS AWESOME.

The primary place where this happens is Adobe InDesign. InDesign is not a particularly complex piece of software, but for me it’s the apex of my capabilities. I’ve stumbled through figuring it out over the last 5 years, as I use it nearly every day for prototyping games. Most I’ve what I’ve learned on InDesign comes from the clicking around to see what stuff does.

Today I was working on the latest Charterstone prototype on InDesign. There are lots of cards in the game, so some of the files are at least 10 pages long. Typical I scroll, scroll, scroll using the wheel on my mouse as I travel up and down the document.

As I was doing this today, something happened. While I was scrolling, I suddenly whipped through multiple pages. I then realized that my pinky finger was resting on the shift key. It hit me:

Shift + scroll = MEGA SCROLL!

This is spectacular. It’s just a little thing, but I love that I discovered it by accident even more than if I had intentionally learned it.

Have you ever had this happen? What’s your greatest accidental computer shortcut discovery?

6 thoughts on “Pet Please #129: Discovering a New Computer Shortcut by Accident”

    • Adam: Oh yeah, I’ve loved Ctrl + Scroll ever since I discovered it a few years ago. I like that it works across most software.

      Reply
  1. I LOVE finding things like this. Do you know about Format Painter in Microsoft products like Word or PowerPoint? The little paintbrush at the top left lets you apply a style from something (text, photo, etc) to something else. MAGIC.

    Reply

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