old dog, new mac, missing keys

[DThompson55]

Hi All - this forum has been very helpful during my first week of migrating over. Here's the situation. A good deal of my work needs to be done on Windows VMs. And the missing piece for me are the missing keys. Delete, Home, PageUP, PageDown. There are work-arounds for everything, I can two-figure click the touch pad, pull up a menu and click delete instead of using a Delete key. I can manually scroll to the top of a screen instead of using a Home key. I think all of this is specific to using the Mac keyboard on a Windows VM, because within Mac OS everything seems simple and intuitive now.

So any advice how how to deal with those missing keys?

 

[KevinJS]

Use the arrow keys in combination with the "fn" key.

fn left is Home; fn right is End; fn up is Page Up; fn down is Page Down

 

[MacInWin]

fn key also works with the Delete key. Delete on the Mac is more like a backspace key, but with fn and Delete, it deletes forward like on Windows (which, btw, never made any sense to me in the first place).

 

[DThompson55]

GREAT!!!!... I never knew what that fn button was for. Nor did I realize before that those keys along the top have other uses than just turning volume up.

Another quick one then... in Windows if I had multiple documents open, say in Word. I could hit the F6 key to bounce between the open docs within the same app. So far in Mac OS it looks like I have to go to the window menu and select the specific document from that list.

So... anything like the Windows F6 key in Mac OS?

 

[chscag]

So... anything like the Windows F6 key in Mac OS?

I use Command Tab in MS Word for the Mac to do the same thing. By the way, that also works to switch between apps that are open.

 

[DThompson55]

So, Command Tab seems to switch between apps, but not between docs in the same app like the old F6 key did on Windows. Or am I not seeing something?

 

[chscag]

Yeah, sorry about that. You have to use "spaces" which would be F3 on your keyboard instead. In other words, you would need to put doc 1 and doc 2 in separate spaces and switch between them that way. Not as convenient as using F6 in Windows Word. By the way, the use of F6 is actually a Windows thing not specifically MS Word.

 

[DThompson55]

Brilliant! Thanks! Spaces it is then!