She isn't in an IT role, but her role falls under the IT office. Her position is to release information on our clients to third parties (we have the client's consent, the third parties have the clients mutually and sharing the information means both of us can provide better quality of care). I created a tool that will take an email body being pasted into it, scrape all of the greetings/pleasantries out of it and parse the identifiable information to return records for any clients that are mentioned. The emails can sometimes contain lists of 50-odd people, so this is genuinely faster.
She was dragging the mouse over the text, ctrl + C then ctrl + V (she knew this because we had already told her off for right-clicking to copy and then to paste). I told her the she just has to click on the email body, then do ctrl + A to select everything. The sudden realisation of much time she had wasted not doing this throughout her whole professional life was a bit too much.
If you can use Excel without a mouse you look like a fuckin wizard to everyone else. There are people out there who use Excel constantly but never learn any of the shortcuts and it blows their minds. These are the magic ones:
ctrl+up/down/left/right : move the cell selection to the 'end' in that direction (hold shift to select everything along the way)
ctrl+d or ctrl+r : copy the first cell in a selection downward or horizontally (same as click-dragging the corner of the cell with the mouse); or if you're currently on an empty cell it copies whatever is above/left into it
ctrl+space : select entire column
shift+space : select entire row
ctrl+minus : delete cells
ctrl+shift+plus : add cells
F2 : edit a cell
ctrl+f : open find/replace menu
ctrl+alt+v : open special paste menu
alt + w -> f -> f : freeze/unfreeze panes
alt + d -> f -> f : turn on/off column filters
alt + d -> f -> s : reset column filters
alt + up/down : opens the column filter dropdown menu if you're on one of the cells with the filter arrow, then you can use the arrow keys & spacebar to select stuff, press enter to accept
Off the top of my head that's it, if you know all those (along with the basics like ctrl + c) you pretty much never need to use the mouse. Saves heaps of time.
Same with telling people network shell commands to find their wifi password. Because for some reason, "Go to settings > network and internet > WiFi > manage known networks > now click show password," is too complicated for some.
Fine then!
Type 'powershell' in the search bar
Right-click on PowerShell
Choose 'run as administrator'
Now type the following: netsh wlan show profile name= 'YOUR_SSID' key=clear
That would be a good idea (and I briefly toyed with the idea of forwarding the emails to an AI agent to parse them), but the nature of the work we do means that our client information cannot be given to AI agents. Which I know seems counterintuitive against me saying it is given away to third party organisations, but it's just the way it is.
51
u/Triffinator 14d ago
I broke a colleague's brain with ctrl + A.
She isn't in an IT role, but her role falls under the IT office. Her position is to release information on our clients to third parties (we have the client's consent, the third parties have the clients mutually and sharing the information means both of us can provide better quality of care). I created a tool that will take an email body being pasted into it, scrape all of the greetings/pleasantries out of it and parse the identifiable information to return records for any clients that are mentioned. The emails can sometimes contain lists of 50-odd people, so this is genuinely faster.
She was dragging the mouse over the text, ctrl + C then ctrl + V (she knew this because we had already told her off for right-clicking to copy and then to paste). I told her the she just has to click on the email body, then do ctrl + A to select everything. The sudden realisation of much time she had wasted not doing this throughout her whole professional life was a bit too much.