what is the purpose of the insert key
By sahmof2
@sahmof2 (274)
United States
February 6, 2009 1:34pm CST
What is the true purpose of the insert key on the keyboard, besides getting on my nerves when I accidently hit it and start to type without knowing and it is steady erasing the words that I already typed. Before I knew that it was that key that turned my keys into erasers I use to literally delete everything I have typed and started over because I didn't know what else to do.
3 responses
@user_786 (1338)
•
6 Feb 09
Open a Ms Word Document then type in some words. Now if you bring back your cursoer on any word and type in there, the new characters will be added and the words after it will move forward.
Now do the same thing but before that press the Insert Key. You will see that the new words you type in will over-write the words that are after it.
This is what Insert Key does - overwriting
1 person likes this
@Jae2619 (1483)
• United States
6 Feb 09
That's pretty much it... driving people up the wall by it accidently getting hit and not notifying you that you've hit it.
Main purpose, it to enable you to replace a certain amout of text by typing over it. Who ever invented this key should have given it great deal of thought because it causes more issues than helping anyone out. If you wanna enter text, most backspace, or use the arrow keys to the place they wanna add the text... instead of using the insert key... drives me nuts as well.
@jickyeung (201)
• Hong Kong
7 Feb 09
I think what you described is the only purpose of the Insert Key. By the way, it doesn't seems to have any shortcut that require pressing the Insert key, which makes this key even useless... But I guess the Insert key was more useful in DOS environment than in Windows environment. With limited support of keystroke and zero support of mouse in DOS, the Insert key can reduce your time on deleting redundant characters. But still, it isn't very useful...
