 Now's a good time to take a look at the keyboard. First off, in the top left corner you have a key labeled ESC, which is short for escape. The escape key isn't used all that much in today's programs, but it generally can be used as another way to dismiss dialogue windows, it's like hitting cancel. It also sometimes can be used to deselect something if you have it selected. The function keys are at the top of the keyboard and labeled F1, F2, F3, F4 and so forth up to F12. These keys aren't used very much today either in most programs and when they are used their meaning varies from program to program. Three more keys which are hardly used anymore are the print screen key, the scroll lock key and the pause key. In Windows you can hit the print screen key to capture a screenshot of the current image on the screen. When you hit the scroll lock key you'll notice that it toggles on this light on your keyboard. The light is meant to indicate whether scroll lock is currently on or off, but this is an archaic holdover. Modern operating systems like Windows and modern programs just have no concept of scroll lock, so in practice this key just doesn't do anything. Similarly the pause button just has no general meaning in most programs, however in many games you can hit the pause button and it will pause the game, but aside from that it's just not really used anymore. At the bottom of the keyboard you'll find two keys both labeled CTRL which is short for control. Both of these keys do the same thing, there's simply two of them for the sake of convenience. The idea behind the control key is that in many programs you have what are called keyboard shortcuts or key combos, wherein to perform actions rather than having to click on something you can hold down the CTRL key and hit some other key like say a letter like W, and that key combination of holding CTRL and hitting W is the same as clicking on say some button. You'll also find at the bottom of the keyboard on both sides of the space bar a key called ALT, which is short for alternate. The ALT key is often used in combination with the CTRL key in key combos, but also the ALT key is used in what are called accelerators. The idea behind accelerators is that you will notice that in menu bars of programs certain letters are underlined, and the idea is that you can hold ALT and hit that letter and it's the same as clicking on that menu. And then in the menu that appears you'll see that some items have certain letters underlined and if you hit the letter on the keyboard it's the same as clicking that item. So the CTRL key and the ALT key are basically about keyboard shortcuts. For things we do repeatedly and very frequently in programs it's nice to have keyboard shortcuts because it's often easier just to hit a couple keys on the keyboard rather than having to move the mouse and click. One more key you'll see two of at the bottom of your keyboard is what's called the Windows key, and it's usually labeled with a Microsoft Windows icon. If you hit this key it's the same as clicking on the start menu button and the Windows start menu will pop up. Also the Windows key is used in a number of shortcuts for Windows itself. For example, if you hold the Windows key and hit M that will minimize all of your Windows. The key to the right of the right side Windows key is called the context menu key. And as the name implies when you hit this key it will pop up a context menu of whatever you have selected. This is just another convenience for cases when you don't want to use a mouse. On most keyboards you'll find these six keys grouped together. Insert home, page up, delete, and page down. The page up and page down keys as the names imply are simply more conveniences for scrolling. When you hit page up it scrolls up. When you hit page down it scrolls down. When you hit the home key your text cursor will jump to the front of the line you are editing. And when you hit the end key your text cursor will jump to the end of the line you are editing. The delete key will delete the character immediately after your text cursor or if you have something selected it will delete what you have selected. The insert key usually doesn't do anything. It's another archaic holdover. What it used to do in most programs is it would toggle between two text editing modes. In one mode you would type and letters would be inserted where your text cursor is. In the other mode the letters you type would be would overwrite whatever is immediately after the text cursor. Eventually program designers realized that no one actually wants to edit text that way. So there's always just the one mode now. The cursor keys the up down left and right arrows very self-evidently simply move up down left and right. This group of keys on the far right side of the keyboard are collectively known as the num pad as in number pad. And all the keys in the num pad are actually redundant. You don't really need them because the same keys are elsewhere on the keyboard. It's just here because it's a more convenient way to enter a bunch of numbers. The trick with the num pad however is that some of these keys have two labels. For example the seven key is also labeled as home. These keys with two labels are why there is the key in the top left called num lock. When you hit the num lock key you'll notice another light on your keyboard toggles on and off. When the light is on num lock is on and you can use these keys to enter numbers. When the light is off num lock is off and hitting these keys won't insert numbers instead when you hit seven it's the same as hitting the home key. So if you ever find yourself trying to use the num pad but it's not entering numbers just make sure num lock is on. Frankly this is a very annoying feature. I think most users would much prefer it if num lock were always just on by default. If you've ever used a typewriter you should be familiar with the shift keys. When you hold a shift key down and then hit a letter like J it'll insert an uppercase J rather than a lowercase J. Also you have a number of keys on the keyboard like say the number keys where there is a secondary character written above like say the one key has an exclamation mark above it. That indicates that when you hold shift down and hit the one key it will insert an exclamation mark rather than a number one. The caps lock key which is above the left shift key is another key which toggles between two modes. When you hit the caps lock key you will notice this other light on the keyboard toggle on and off. When caps lock is on hitting a letter key will insert an uppercase character and holding shift and then hitting that same key will insert a lowercase character so it effectively reverses the normal behavior with shift. However this reversal only affects the letter keys so if you want to insert an exclamation mark you still have to hold down shift when you hit the one key. Above the caps lock key is the tab key. In some text editing programs when you hit the tab key it inserts what's called a tab character which is basically the equivalent of about four or five spaces. In many other programs however hitting the tab key will cycle keyboard focus meaning that it will move the keyboard focus to some other element in the program. So for example here in this program where I compose an email I have three text fields I need to fill in. To type in a text field normally I need to click on it to give it keyboard focus but here's what I can do with a tab key. I can click in the text field at the top the one where I'm supposed to put an email address the recipient of this email and then move to the text field where I need to fill in the subject I hit the tab key. Once I'm done typing out the subject for this email I can just hit tab again and it takes me down to where I write the actual body message of the email. So here using the tab key I very conveniently was able to type in these different text fields without taking my hands off the keyboard to move the mouse. Finally the last key on the keyboard is the enter key and notice that there's two of them one on the numpad but they're really just the same key. In most contexts when you're typing text and you hit enter it's effectively like a carriage return on a typewriter it takes you down to the next line. In all other contexts the enter key is used to effectively activate whatever you have highlighted. Like say if you have a list of menu items and you can use the cursor keys to move up and down the list to actually select something in the list you hit enter it's like clicking on the thing which is currently selected.