F5 or F9 what is (or should be) the correct "refresh" key?

Anthony Holmes  25 August 2008 10:59:35 AM

Down the years I've had people complain to me that the use of the F9 key in Notes is non-standard and that the F5 key should be used. I'll be honest and admit that there have been times when I've pressed F5 in Notes to refresh a view and had my screen locked.

Over the weekend I was editing an Excel spreadsheet and for some reason I don't quite understand, it was no longer automatically updating some formulas and charts. It took me a minute or two to remember that the key for Refreshing a document in Excel... is F9. Just like Notes.

The story of Function Keys in Windows is a long and anarchic one. But using F9 for refresh is the most common approach for everything except browsers and file managers. The use of F5 seems to be a more recent accident.

The Wikipedia article on Function Keys describes how the use of Function Keys has been very variable. The only (near) 'universal' Function Key assignment is F1 for Help. This was established by IBM back in 1987 with the IBM Common User Access guidelines. These guidelines established many other aspects of our current computing environment, such as the fact that the File menu always comes first. But the guidelines didn't define a Refresh key.

F9 is used to refresh things in the following places:

• MS: Outlook (since 2003): to check for new mail
• MS Word: to refresh Tables of Contents, Indexes and Fields
• MS Excel: to refresh and (re)calculate all the worksheets in a workbook
• Lotus Notes: to refresh views
  
• Internet Explorer: not used
• Windows Explorer: not used

F5 is used to:

• Outlook 2000 and 2002 (but not newer): to check for new mail
• MS Word: Find and Replace
• MS Excel: Go To
• Lotus Notes: to lock the screen
  
• Web Browsers: to refresh the page
• Windows Explorer: to refresh file lists

It seems clear that browsers/file managers are the odd ones out, but people expect F5 to be refresh because browsers are where you need to do it most often. It would be interesting to know how this happened. Did one of the original browsers use F5, so MS felt bound to copy it when they first produced IE? Or was the user interface person simply off sick the day the choice got made?

Ray Ozzie anecdote

Ray Ozzie was the key original architect for Lotus Notes, and would certainly have been around when the original decision was made to use F9 for refreshes in Notes. Nowadays he's the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, the company that is probably largely responsible for both the first (F9) and the second standard (F5). But his mind is not focussed on the minutiae of consistent user interface, because in this article he proposed an entirely different use for the F5 key:

"Take PowerPoint, for example," he [Ray Ozzie] tells a gaggle of analysts crowding around him at a Microsoft cocktail party in July. "Wouldn't it be great if you could hit F5 when you finished preparing a presentation and have your PC automatically upload the file to a Web address?"



(PS: I got my spreadsheet to start automatically calculating without F9 by going to Tools; Options... Calculation, "Automatic".)
(PPS: I'm using an Excel spreadsheet rather than a Symphony Spreadsheet because I'm using an excellent spreadsheet I obtained for managing diabetes that is extremely focussed on graphs that combine many different graphing features and that need to be positioned down to the pixel. Neither Symphony nor Open Office currently properly present all the graphs at this stage even though all the calculations work just fine. No doubt it will display better after another release or two of Symphony or Open Office.)

 

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