Two Quick Computer Shortcuts: F8 (Camera) and Shift-Z (Google)

I recently had two completely silly but frustrating issues happen, both of which I found shortcuts to online. They may be helpful to you.

Shortcut to check if your Camera is not working

Saturday night, I was doing my best to prep for the Actors’ Equity Association Delegate Convention, and had a couple choices – upgrade my full internet, or suddenly fight the fact that my web camera was no longer working. I restarted my computer several times, as well as the other one….

I ended up in tech support with Windows help. I downloaded the Lenovo Updater app, after I learned about a dedicated website from the person helping me….I updated a scary BIOS update, that likely needed to be done. I updated camera drivers. I made sure that Zoom was off so the camera could be seen in another program……………you know what it was????

In hindsight, that is exactly the same icon that my computer was showing me. Camera. Off. Sigh.

Shortcut when organizing your Google Drive

Meanwhile, this week, I’ve also been fighting organizing my Google Drive. I usually LOVE Google Drive. It’s so much easier to print from if you’re using someone else’s computer (like a company’s) than Dropbox. It works just like a regular drive for my documents. And now, trying to save paper, I’m trying to take as many notes as possible in Google Docs. Right now, I’m working with someone else – all remotely – through both Google and Dropbox, and she shared her Drive folder with me. Suddenly this time, I could only see the “add a shortcut” option to my drive, not to ADD it to my drive. This created an issue yesterday, when I suddenly had an internet outage in my area and I was the only one with the up to date PowerPoint presentation. I managed to get on a free wifi connection long enough to email the doc to her. So today I did some searching and found this video.

Seriously. All you have to do is select the folder that has been shared, and then SHIFT-Z. You can then move it to whatever subfolder you like. Done.

Hope these are helpful to YOU.