[1] While researching his answers for How To, Munroe investigated how to dry out a phone that has fallen in water.

However, he could not find a reliable practical answer, and did not want to give readers bad information.

After the index appears How to Change a Light Bulb, drawn on one page in the style of a comic strip.

Shankland contended that How To forces the reader to "appreciate the glorious complexity of our universe and the amazing breadth of humanity’s effort to comprehend it" through its "hilariously edifying answers" to some everyday and some improbable questions.

[2] Publishers Weekly described the text as "generously laced with dry humor" with "Munroe's comic stick-figure art [being an] added bonus.