Zen and Your Computer
Feb 19, 2010 09:54 AM Filed in: Computing
Take a deep breath. Don’t panic. You own your computer; it doesn’t own you.
Seriously, a deep breath. Expand your belly to pull down your diaphragm to its deepest. Take the air in through your nose. Let the breath out slowly now, through your mouth.
Look, with slightly un-focused eyes, at your computer screen. Become slowly aware of what’s there. It has a left and a right side, a top and a bottom. It has a keyboard to give the screen your commands. It has a mouse or a trackpad to point with and to show the computer who’s boss.
Okay, use your focused eyes now. Across the top of your screen, assuming you have a program open, is a selection of words. These are usually “File” “Edit” “View” etc. These words are categories of actions you might want to command the computer to do. Once you click on any one of them, a menu—or list—of other items related to that category will present itself. It will “drop down” and allow you to select any of them with your pointer.
These categories don’t change much from computer to computer and application to application. “File” usually contains things you want to do with the document on which you’re working: “Save” it somewhere, “Save As…” a different name, “Print” it, and so forth. These are typically global commands applying to the whole document. These are the types of things you would do with a real-world paper document involving a filing cabinet or a trash can.
The “Edit” category will generally have commands related to small parts of your document. It will have actions listed to “Copy” a portion of your document that you’ve highlighted. It will have an option to “Paste” something in your document, perhaps from one portion to another or even from a different document. The “Edit” category is the category where, in the real world, you’d be using an eraser and scissors and tape.
And so on—these commands within the categories tend to be similar from one type of software to the next. Microsoft Office 2007 changed some of these conventions, but if you look closely, the approach still works.
When I think about Microsoft sometimes I need to stop and take a deep breath myself. We’ll continue this and perhaps a discussion of Office 2007 another time.
Seriously, a deep breath. Expand your belly to pull down your diaphragm to its deepest. Take the air in through your nose. Let the breath out slowly now, through your mouth.
Look, with slightly un-focused eyes, at your computer screen. Become slowly aware of what’s there. It has a left and a right side, a top and a bottom. It has a keyboard to give the screen your commands. It has a mouse or a trackpad to point with and to show the computer who’s boss.
Okay, use your focused eyes now. Across the top of your screen, assuming you have a program open, is a selection of words. These are usually “File” “Edit” “View” etc. These words are categories of actions you might want to command the computer to do. Once you click on any one of them, a menu—or list—of other items related to that category will present itself. It will “drop down” and allow you to select any of them with your pointer.
These categories don’t change much from computer to computer and application to application. “File” usually contains things you want to do with the document on which you’re working: “Save” it somewhere, “Save As…” a different name, “Print” it, and so forth. These are typically global commands applying to the whole document. These are the types of things you would do with a real-world paper document involving a filing cabinet or a trash can.
The “Edit” category will generally have commands related to small parts of your document. It will have actions listed to “Copy” a portion of your document that you’ve highlighted. It will have an option to “Paste” something in your document, perhaps from one portion to another or even from a different document. The “Edit” category is the category where, in the real world, you’d be using an eraser and scissors and tape.
And so on—these commands within the categories tend to be similar from one type of software to the next. Microsoft Office 2007 changed some of these conventions, but if you look closely, the approach still works.
When I think about Microsoft sometimes I need to stop and take a deep breath myself. We’ll continue this and perhaps a discussion of Office 2007 another time.
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