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POWERtools for novices

Making Your Computer Work for You

Multiple Applications and Task Switching

Back in the Stone Age, when I first started working with computers, they could only do one thing at a time. Part of the rationale behind the design of window-based operating systems for personal computers was to allow us to work on multiple applications during the same time period and to switch back and forth between them easily. But the early personal computers had such limited resources in processor speed and memory that task switching was slow and cumbersome. Many of us resorted to running only one application at a time.

Today's modern personal computers are so fast and have so much memory that you should expect them to run multiple applications easily. Our goal today is to show you some techniques for switching efficiently between applications. After all, humans are very efficient "parallel processors," and your computer ought to enhance your ability to do this.

The first thing to learn is that you should never close an application unless you are pretty sure you aren't going to use it again for awhile. How long is awhile? That depends on the individual, but for me, it's usually for the rest of the day.

Once you get used to leaving multiple applications running, you begin to discover that your computer desktop starts to look like your physical desktop when you are busy with lots of tasks: there are multiple pages lying on top of one another, and you must shuffle them around as you move from task to task.

One way to do this is to move the pages you are not currently using out of the way:

• In the Wintel world you can do this by minimizing the current application: click on the minimize box in the upper right-hand corner of the application page. This is the box with the horizontal line in it, not the one with the x. Notice that a new entry appears in the task bar at the bottom of your desktop. Later, when you want to get back to that page, you can click on that entry to bring the page back.
• In the Macintosh world, you do this by hiding an application using the finder menu in the upper right-hand corner of your desktop. The top part of the menu will allow you to choose an application to hide. When you do this, it disappears from your desktop, but it remains in the lower part of the finder menu. Selecting any active application from the finder menu, whether it is hidden or not, will bring it forward on the desktop to become your current active application. (Note: this applies to Mac Operating Systems prior to OSX. We'll have to wait and see how OSX does this, but I'm sure there will be a way.)

Exercise 7:

Practice minimizing or hiding your applications and then making them active again. Start with at least two different active applications, say your word processor and your web browser.

As you become more skilled working with multiple applications, you may become annoyed with the amount of time it takes to minimize or hide an application. Then you'll want an even faster method to do task switching. There is a keyboard shortcut that cycles through all the active applications, making each one the current application in turn. For Wintel users, this is Alt-Tab, and for Mac users, this is Command-tab.

Exercise 8:

Start up at least one more application, say your email program, so that you have three applications running. Then practice using the keyboard shortcut for task switching to cycle between them.

Exercise 9:

Combine your skills with copy and paste with your skills at task switching:

• cut a word or paragraph from your web browser
• switch to your word processor
• paste the text into your word processor document

and use your mouse only to select the text. (Use keyboard shortcuts for everything else.)

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