Undo Undo Undo

There are a lot of things I find absolutely essential in working with computers.   There are things that taken away, would make the task of getting daily work done both arduous and much more time consuming.   Take the mouse for example (or touch pad).   Can you move around with the keyboard alone?   Actually, you can.   There are keyboard commands and shortcuts to get mostly anywhere, but it’s so much easier to just move the pointer and click, or double click or drag.

But my favorite and indispensable feature is Undo,   Undo and Redo.   I can take every word I’ve typed so far in this blog post, select it and press the delete key and—oh crap, it’s gone—or is it?  All I have to do is Undo and it’s back, right there, just like it was before.

Not only can I undo once, I can undo many times, as the computer is keeping a stack of all the actions I’ve done, letting me back out one, three, ten or more changes.   I use this feature all the time when I write presentations.   I put things on a slide, move them around, change font size, delete and add things.   Do I like the new layout?  If I don’t I just press Undo, Undo, Undo, etc. until I get back to the starting point of the slide.

It’s like a sandbox you can play in without penalty.   So why don’t people know about Undo?   I was over at my best friends house the other day, showing her some things on her Mac.   I was helping her with a presentation and mentioned Undo.   She didn’t use it, she said.   So I gave her a demo:  I deleted some text, I dragged a paragraph into the middle of another paragraph, I went over to the slide deck on the side and selected ten slides and deleted them—I basically destroyed hours of work.

She screamed (which was fun) and was visibly upset.   Then I calmly said, “watch this” and pressed Undo until it was all back.   And she marveled at the power of Undo.   I showed her Undo and Redo.   She said she had retyped things from scratch before from accidentally deleting them.    And my friend isn’t alone.   I’ve met many people over the years that don’t know about this one incredibly powerful feature of our computers.  

It’s not just within applications, it can be files you accidentally deleted or moved and don’t know which folder your fingers mistakenly dragged them to.  It’s in almost all applications and it’s one of my favorite features.   I don’t think I want to work on a computer that doesn’t have Undo.

The Big Boy Update: My son asked me yesterday, “is right zig or is left zig?”   I said, “as in ‘zig zag’?”   He said that was what he was talking about.   I told him I didn’t know and could he let me know if he found out?

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter likes to be useful.   Or maybe what I mean is she likes to be capable.   It’s a strong urge she has because of the blindness.  When we were distributing luminary materials on Sunday for three hours she helped scoop sand and put candles and white bags in stacks.    She kept asking what else she could do to help.   I know in part she wanted to help, but another part I think (but don’t really know) is the other children were running around chasing each other and climbing on large, sharp rocks on an embankment.   She couldn’t see or follow them and she didn’t know the unfamiliar terrain, which could hurt her.    But she was the best helper we had at the whole event.