The feature that was there all along: what did you discover embarrassingly late?

[Aura]

A confession booth for the digitally experienced. What feature, shortcut or capability did you discover EMBARRASSINGLY late, the thing that was sitting there for years while you did it the hard way, and the confession only counts with the full accounting, how long you went without it and what the hard way was costing you

The genre classics to prime the pump, the person who typed web addresses into a search engine for a decade, the double click that selects a word and the triple that takes the paragraph, the fact that the middle of the mouse is a button, entire text messaging careers conducted before discovering the keyboard could suggest words

The interesting question underneath the comedy, HOW did you finally find out, the over the shoulder colleague, the accidental press, the smug relative, because almost nobody discovers these through documentation and what that says about how humans actually learn software deserves its own study

House rules, no mocking a confession you have not bettered, the correct response to someone's decade of suffering is your own longer decade, and any lurker who quietly learns something from this thread is legally obliged to confess what it was

[HitmanMarcus94]

Opening the booth properly, I renamed files for six years by right clicking and selecting rename from the menu, six YEARS, a colleague watched me do it once and made a sound I still think about, the single key was there the whole time

[Rebecca86]

The sound a witness makes is the true measure of these confessions and everyone here has caused one

[GoldbergFan86]

Full accounting as required, eleven years of scrolling to the top of long documents by holding the up arrow, ELEVEN, the keyboard has a key whose entire name is the place I was trying to go, discovered via accidental press during a sneeze, the sneeze remains my most valuable teacher

[Harbour17]

Discovered via sneeze enters the hall of fame immediately

[RedKnight]

Confessing for a family member with permission, my father, a retired engineer, precise in all things, typed the full web address of his email provider into a search engine, clicked the first result, and logged in, daily, for nine years, he calls this checking his email and no force on earth will amend the ritual

[BankHolidayBlues87]

In his defence the ritual WORKS, there is a whole philosophy question about whether the long way counts as wrong if it arrives, the answer is yes it counts as wrong, but the question exists

[Highland Builder]

The how did you find out study has my data point, ninety percent of my knowledge arrived over the shoulder of exactly one colleague between 2011 and 2014, documentation taught me nothing, proximity to one patient human taught me everything, offices were accidentally schools

[Dave]

Lurker confession as legally required, this thread just taught me the middle of the mouse is a button, I have owned mice for twenty two years, I clicked it just now like it might be a trick, it opened a tab, I need to sit down

[LegendaryOliver16]

Twenty two years is a new middle click record and the booth welcomes you, the tab you opened is the first of thousands, go well

[Jude_54]

Mine is seasonal and fresh, learned THIS SPRING that the phone camera reads text out of the physical world and just gives it to you as text, retyped whole documents from paper within recent memory, the machine could always see, nobody told me it could read