Upgraded office to Logitech K235 kbd/mice. How can I help my users who are complaining that there is no caps lock light?

Question

The question is in the title.

I just upgraded an office from older keyboards which were starting to fail from overuse.

The new K235 units have a nice feel and am hearing no complaints about the decision to go with this less-expensive model.

But I am getting some grumbling from some people that the new ones do not have a caps lock light.

(They don't appreciate my telling them that I merely removed that keycap from mine).

Almost every day I hear about someone who was touch-typing only to discover they had bumped the caps lock key and then had to go back and retype what they had just finished.

So is there a way I can help these hard workers?

Answer 1

Software

You can have them install Keyboard LEDs system tray icon, which will display the status of their caps/num/scroll lock keys.

Hardware

You can shop for another keyboard, or get a dedicated caps lock light (seems like a waste of cabling / desk space to me though, plus it's an additional purchase that might be more expensive than replacing your keyboards.)

User Training

Tell users to quit looking at the keys and learn how to touch type! Touch typing is so much better in so many ways. It's faster, more comfortable, and you can see the results of your input instantly, instead of typing several sentences or paragraphs and THEN looking. If you're touch typing, you rarely even notice the little caps lock light, because your hand/fingers tends to cover it up.

If while touch typing you make a mistake and activate caps lock by accident, you'll notice it right away because you're looking at every character you produce as you produce them, and might type maybe a couple characters in caps before you realize it, delete, and re-type... much, much less re-work than if you were typing by looking at the keys!

Time Travel

Before buying a bunch of keyboards for an office and rolling them out, buy a small number of them and get a focus group of users to test them out, make sure they have the features and ergonomics desired. Hopefully any major complaints like this would be worked out during the testing.

Answer 2

Assuming that your co-workers are using Windows 7, 8/8.1, or 10, you can enable a notification for when Caps lock (as well as Num and Scroll locks) are pressed. To do this:

1. Open up Control Panel.

2. Go to Ease of Access Center.

3. Make the keyboard easier to use.

4. Check the "Turn on Toggle Keys" check box.

5. Click "Apply", then "OK".

After that, they will hear a tone when those buttons are pressed.

Answer 3

1. Add your own CapsLock indicator. Install AutoHotkey, it's a general keyboard automation program, could be greatly useful for automatically expanding short forms of words, adding keyboard shortcuts to programs, etc.

Then edit the config and add something like :

$CapsLock::
SoundBeep, 440,500       
SoundBeep, 440,500 
SoundBeep, 440,500        
SoundBeep, 349,350        
SoundBeep, 523,150        
SoundBeep, 440,500        
SoundBeep, 349,350        
SoundBeep, 523,150        
SoundBeep, 440,1000 
SoundBeep, 659,500        
SoundBeep, 659,500        
SoundBeep, 659,500        
SoundBeep, 698,350        
SoundBeep, 523,150        
SoundBeep, 415,500        
SoundBeep, 349,350        
SoundBeep, 523,150        
SoundBeep, 440,1000
Send {CapsLock}
return

Now every time they press capslock, they get a rousing StarWars Imperial March audio to let them know.

Should that ever get tiresome, you could replace it with any helpful thing the people wanted - launch a program, run a script, play a sound file, blink the screen, shake a window around, change a colour somewhere, anything from the AutoHotkey command list or any program or script it can launch or any Win32api function it can call.

2. Almost every day I hear about someone who was touch-typing only to discover they had bumped the caps lock key and then had to go back and retype what they had just finished.

Seriously though, this is a sign of miserably, depressingly weak tools or lack of IT training / exploration. Any text editor worth its salt can swap the case of selected text.

• Microsoft Word can do it for the last 10 years.
• Notepad++ can do it for free.
• Vim can do it, for the last 16 years at least.

The worst it should be is a copy/paste to a good editor and back again, not a retyping. (And that copy-paste, change-case, copy-paste could be automated with AutoHotkey).

Answer 4

You could disable Caps Lock, or convert it to be a shift key using a registry entry.

KeyTweak will do it with a GUI, but its help file details the registry key you'd need to edit, which could make roll out faster.

Answer 5

It's been sort of talked around but not really stated: Teach your users. I don't mean teach them to type better, but how to painlessly fix capsing mistakes.

Do some research and figure out, for each program your users type large amounts of text into, the best way to reverse the caps effect. And by best here I mean maximise some combination of

• Ease of learning
• Ease of explaining
• Ease of performing
• Ease of remembering

for your particular audience. Then make some kind of cheat-sheet or other document and distribute it.

If any of the programs involved are particularly cantankerous, consider if making some kind of macro, script, or utility can be done quickly enough to be worthwile and distributed in a maintainable way.

If nothing else, a self-contained program that reverses the case of the contents of the clipboard when run could be compiled from maybe a dozen lines in AutoHotKey; it would lose formatting, though, if your users are formatting while typing head-down.