Certain skills about the machines that surround us are essential parts of life. As a kid you learn to ride your bicycle. With maturity, you learn to drive a car. And now, just about anybody anywhere sitting at a desk at work probably needs to know about using a personal computer.
At the heart of computer use is knowing that there are two things always going on when one fires up a PC. First, a program runs. If your job involves working with words the program will be a word processor. If your new job involves tracking business using numbers, the bosses will sit you down in front of a spreadsheet program.
Other programs (also called applications) are databases that are used for things like keeping inventories, scheduling software used to track business projects and e-mail, used to send and receive messages either on the company’s own network or by the Internet.
The second element of computing is that whatever you do with the programs that run at your desk gets collected in bits of computer code called files.
These files can be a letter to a customer, the annual budget for a Fortune 500 enterprise, a list of all the paint cans in a neighborhood hardware store or a brief note sent to the supply room requesting paper clips.
Files are saved as you create them and stored for later use, revision or reference. Sometimes files are saved on the computer you are using, which likely has a hard drive for both holding the code for the programs it runs and for storing the files that workers create using those programs.
Sometimes, however, the files get saved on other computers connected to the one sitting on your desk. Occasionally files get saved on floppy disks that can be inserted into a slot on the computer’s face.
Nothing is as important to successful computer use as grasping how and when to save your work.
The great bulk of programs accept commands to do things such as saving files through a system called toolbars, or words in a row at the top of the screen.
The first of these is the word “File” and you use it by moving the computer’s mouse pointer arrow to the word and clicking on the mouse button.
This will bring up a list of possible actions including “Save.” It is a very good idea to use this command frequently to assure that the work you already have done doesn’t vanish in a cloud of electrons when glitches occur.
And you can rest assured that glitches will occur. The darkest side of all to the computer revolution is how often machines crash, thus losing all unsaved work.
No typewriter ever did that and neither did a fountain pen or a pencil. The computer gives much but it also takes away. And when one enters your life, you’ll soon see just how badly that taking away can hurt.
So consider the knowledge of clicking File and then Save to be the single most useful bit of advice you can get about computers and jobs.
The second key feature for getting through a day’s work at the computer probably is another option under the file menu, called Open.
This is how you call up the work you have done in the past and saved. When you invoke the Open command you will be given a list of all of the files that the software you are running has created in the past. You pick the one you want and then move the mouse arrow over it and click to open.
Last on the list of File menu commands is Close, which you will use at the end of a task to shut down the file.
To the right of the File tool will be any number of other items depending upon what software you are using. If you need to use these, you will be shown the ropes by the employer on a case-by-case basis.
But there are a few universal tricks to using a computer than can be valuable to know from the very start, and the best of them is one called the clipboard.
The clipboard is a feature designed to allow users to take part of the information created in a file and copy it to the computer’s memory.
In some cases you will do this just to erase stuff that you decide must go. In other cases you can use the clipboard to move stuff. Sometimes you might use it to erase a paragraph at the top of a document and then insert that paragraph later on in the text.
This, in fact, is the heart of why computers have replaced so many other techniques for doing office work. The way they allow one to revise the work instantly is far easier than trying to manipulate stuff created on paper.
Whether you are writing a report in a word processor or trying to make sense of a series of numbers for an office budget on a spreadsheet, the ability to select parts already created and either remove them seamlessly or move them about is a huge booster of productivity.
So the mechanics of the clipboard are worth learning well. They lurk under the toolbar heading to the right of File under the heading Edit.
To use them, first you need to get the hang of using the mouse to select material to be clipped. Move the mouse pointer to where you want to start clipping and then press down the button. Keep it down and drag the mouse and, as it moves, the color of the selected stuff will change. When you get to the end of the clip, let go of the button.
Now move the pointer to the Edit on the toolbar and click it open. You will find the choices of Cut or Copy. Both put your clip in memory. Cut also removes the selection. Copy leaves the stuff where it is and keeps a copy in memory.
If you want to delete the selection, the task is done once you hit Cut. If you want to move it you need to go to the part of the file where you want it and click your mouse pointer at the desired insertion point. Then move to Edit and select the command Paste and the selection will appear at the insertion point.
Copy is identical except that the selection remains intact where it is and then appears as well where it is pasted. Perhaps the best part of understanding the clipboard is knowing that once you cut or copy something in one file, you can then open another file and use the Paste command to move the selection from file to file.
You can, for example copy the address on one letter, close that file and then open a new letter and paste it without bothering to retype.
Happily this works between applications so that you can do things like open a spreadsheet and select a chunk of numbers, save them to the clipboard and then open a word-processing program and paste them into a document there.
As you progress in computer expertise you will find this clipboard trick a great way to do things like collect information from e-mail or even a Web site and then paste it into whatever program you might need to work with.
There is, of course, a lot more to learn about using a computer on the job, but none of it can happen until you grasp the basics of programs versus files, saving files and opening them, moving stuff about in a single file or among several files.
So when they put you in front of that first computer, start at the upper left corner of your screen with File and Edit and you’ll soon be whipping out work with the best of them.
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More technology: James Coates’ Binary Beat and Software Spotlight columns appear in the Sunday Tribune Business section. For his popular Ask Jim Why column, see Monday’s Business.Technology section.
