When you are creating Dragon Step-by-Step or Advanced Scripting commands, or when your mouse fails you, understanding how to operate a computer solely with a keyboard is very useful.
Moreover, there are many instances where it is faster to use a keyboard than a mouse — experience and experimentation is needed to determine exactly when. My personal rule of thumb is that if it takes me longer to reach for one of my mice, maneuver the cursor, click, move, click and so on than it does for me to press a few keyboard keys, then the keyboard is faster.
I reiterate, however, the real power of keyboarding relates to creating Dragon commands. In such instances, efficiency is unimportant as Dragon will effectively press keys and key sequences infinitely faster than a human can.
Most current PC users, regardless of age (except perhaps the 35 to 45 year olds who were computer geeks back in the day) have never been taught how to efficiently use a computer. That is, how to use a keyboard. This was made evident to me while observing others use a computer over the past 15+ years. It was intriguing for me to watch mousing techniques when a few simple and quick keyboard strokes would suffice nicely.
One of my clients even suggested I write a booklet about using a computer efficiently. In truth, I feel that all this information is already out there, but perhaps not presented in an easily digestible manner. Hence my using this blog as a platform for more than Dragon related information, but also computer skills that were quite simply never learned by the majority of the population because there was no opportunity to do so. In the end, it is important to me to deliver this information to my clients so that it will assist them in creating extremely powerful Dragon commands, which will ultimately save them both time and money.
But I digress… onward.
