Computer newbies

Tonight I went to a talk about the new possibilities of GPS systems. The speaker, a salesman, had a powerpoint presentation that his secretary made for him. At a point, he wanted to go back to the previous slide, and did this in the only way he seemed to know: by right-clicking, and selecting 'Previous slide'. But the touchpad isn't so easy to use, so he had some difficulty in doing that. I was sitting in front, so I said 'You can also use the left-arrow key'. He looked at me surprised, tried it out, saw that it worked, and looked at me as if he had seen the light.

How often haven't I been considered a computer guru for such simple things! Many people are still surprised when they see me use copy-paste, or ctrl-left-arrow and ctrl-right-arrow to move through a text faster.

Copy-paste I learned by simply reading the first few chapters of the manual. Ctrl-arrow navigation and left-arrow in powerpoint I simply learned by trying key combinations. Many people are afraid to experiment with software. Why? Are they afraid that if they press the left-arrow that it will erase half of their slides and give the other slides a purple background?

Look, I've done pretty amazing things with computers, if I may say so. I've written software to compare gene sequences really fast, written nifty code that combines C++ templates with macros to easily get function pointers of a DLL, code that generates other code, and more. If you consider me a computer guru, do it because of those things, not for the simple stuff that everybody should know.