Keys F1-2-3-4 etc

[Coldicote]

I was interested to see Chuck's answer to another question when he said Press F11. This leads me to ask what all the other keys on that bank are for, from F1 up to F12. Is there a reference somewhere to explain the purpose of them? Hopefully, thank you Chuck.

[Coldicote]

Many thanks Trimeresurus, you replied so quicky perhaps you were waiting for the question!

[Maydup]

Well I never, off to dust down my function keys and get using the!

What a good question.

[ChuckFickens]

There are loads of useful things you can do with the keyboard (other than type) which can speed up your use of a computer once you get used to them...

http://www.computerhe...com/hotkeysbasic.html

(the above is a basic list, there are loads more)

[Old_Geezer]

Different apps can reprogramme them to do what it wants.
Suites of things, like Office, tend to be consistent.
On boot up some of them can take you to menus etc. You can experiment and find out.

[beso]

Technically, different apps don't really "reprogram the keys". Keys simply send a "scancode" to the processor. During start up these keys are first interpreted by the BIOS and then by the Operating System which is triggered to do certain actions by the scan codes.

During normal running the OS interprets the scancode and produce a character code which is why a keyboard can be changed to another layout for different languages. It is common geek joke to set someone's keyboard to another language.

Most programs receive the character code and the program is designed to interpret this code in certain way. That interpretation can be changed within the program to do different tasks.

[Coldicote]

Thank you all for so many interesting answers.