By Timothy Hopkins

If you are like most students on campus, you probably spend most of your time in front of a computer, both here and at home. Some would even argue that it’s the most important tool for a student in the modern era, and with good reason. Computers help us type out papers, program applications, organize and design projects — and they connect us to the ultimate worldwide communication device, the internet. They are in many ways a digital representation of each one of us. We all link into that digital world by way of our keyboard.

With any powerful tool, if you want to realize its full potential, you need to know what all the buttons do. You don’t get a new car and not figure out relatively quickly what each one of those little things do. “What if someday I need to use it,” you might ask yourself. Your keyboard helps you control your global digital image, and it demands the same respect.

Now I know some of you might be leaning back like, “Check out the stones on this guy! He thinks we need him to explain to us how to use the letters and symbols on a keyboard.” Frankly, your command of the language that you communicate in is your own problem and not my area of study, so that’s not it. I’ll bet I can teach you something about your keyboard that you don’t know, though. Most of you look at these keys every single day without ever giving them a second thought. They are so powerful that they stand at the top of your keyboard, and most people are oblivious to their very existence. They are your FUNCTION keys!

The function keys issue convenient commands to more fluently access and manipulate your operating system and applications. To go into their functionality with respect to each individual application would be ridiculous, because there are countless programs out there. Additionally, not every keyboard is the same, so utilizing their functionality may vary from user to user. Generally speaking, if the function key (F-key) isn’t the button’s default purpose, it’s likely that there is a “Fn” key near your CTRL and ALT buttons that needs to be pressed at the same time as the intended F-key. Below, I have provided a general explanation of each key’s probable use within your system for F1–F12.

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Almost universally utilized as a help feature for the application that you are using. So the next time you are in a program and don’t know how to do something, wake the “function” up — use F1! This can also be paired with the Windows key to access the Microsoft Windows Help and Support Center.

So you just downloaded a file from the internet and it has a confusing name. You know that if you rename it, it will be easier to find later. It’s a good thing that F2 is on the keyboard, because that is exactly what you do with it. Highlight a file, icon or directory that you want to change the name of and press F2. Another fun fact about F2 is that if you press it along with the CTRL button in Microsoft Word, it will show a print preview screen so you know what the printer is going to be spitting out!

How many times have you been in a program and realized you didn’t know where to find something? Oh “function”! It’s okay though, because F3 can fix this. You see, pressing F3 opens a search feature in most programs. For all you Apple users, F3 also opens Mission Control on OS X. And for all you future system administrators out there, remember that F3 repeats the last command in CLI.

Have you every accidentally cast your browser screen in full-screen mode and lost the address bar? Don’t worry, you aren’t trapped on the webpage you are at. Press F4, and your address bar will appear at the top of your screen again. If you pair F4 with ALT, you can also close the active program on your screen.

So you just made a change to something you did in a browser and you need to reload the page to reflect those changes. Look no further than the F5 key, because it’s more fun than the refresh button! On the flip side, say you hate everything you just did in a browser and want to refresh it with no changes retained in memory; just pair it with CTRL and your page will be refreshed and reset to its original presentation. When used within Microsoft Word, F5 opens the find/replace tool so you can make large-scale writing changes in a snap.

Have you ever found yourself with a keyboard and a broken mouse? How on earth will you check your Facebook account if you can’t navigate to the address bar? How do you do that on a keyboard? Ah! Oh, wait, that’s what F6 does. Cool!

Are you bad at spelling? Struggle to find the grammar checker in all the different tools that Microsoft applications have? Press F7, and it will open the tool for you. In fact, I’ll do you one better: Pair it with SHIFT, and it opens the thesaurus (because who wants to use the same word all the time?). Isn’t life better when we don’t spend all our time looking for things?

Well, it finally happened: You clicked on too many pop-ups and now your computer is inundated with problems. Now your computer is recommending you open in Safe Mode. Wait, what? How the “function” do I do that? It’s all going to be okay. Press F8 when prompted by your computer following a restart. Just make sure you are fast, because that command flies by!

This function is a nice multipurpose tool in Microsoft Office programs. For example, in Word it refreshes a document, while in Outlook it opens a tool to send and receive email. On an Apple computer OS 10.3-plus, it shows a thumbnail image of all active windows in a single workspace.

Oh “function”! You hit a button and now the menu bar at the top of your application is gone! Relax, that’s what F10 is used for. Or say your mouse broke and your right mouse button doesn’t work anymore — click the item while holding down F10 and SHIFT together, and you’ll realize you never needed it!

Say you’ve just spent a long and demanding day on campus, and you want to sit back and watch a movie or play a game on your computer. It would be a bummer to play your media on a small screen when you have a whole computer screen available. Fortunately, by using F11 in most modern internet browsers, you can make it full screen. Wow, doesn’t that look so much better? Also, if you are being instructed to access a recovery partition while fixing your computer, pressing F11 when instructed in the BIOS menu is a great place to start, although it’s not universally utilized.

And finally, there is F12, which is packed with functionality. If you ever need to troubleshoot your operating system and boot from another device, pressing F12 when prompted in the BIOS menu will open a list of all the bootable devices on your computer so you can pick the correct one. That is just the tip of the iceberg, though. It is used in Word in many combinations to print, save and open documents when paired with the likes of CRTL+SHIFT, SHIFT and CTRL, respectively.