502 tips · new ones added continuously
Every tip is one concrete thing you will do better or faster. Filter by what you use and who you are — or just search.
Word and Google Docs can both compare two versions of a file and highlight every difference. No more reading contracts line by line.
Teach Word that “dph” means “value added tax.” AutoCorrect can expand your own custom shortcuts across every Office app.
Asterisks around a word make it bold, underscores make it italic, a dash makes a bullet. A longer work message suddenly looks like a document.
Teams, Zoom, and Meet can all show live speech captions, and Czech is among the supported languages. A lifesaver in noise, with bad audio, or a quiet speaker.
Zoom and Teams can filter out barking, keyboard clatter, and next-door drilling. Just switch noise suppression to high in your audio settings.
Right-click pins a chat to the top of the list, and a key message above the whole conversation — visible to everyone. No more hunting for a link from last week.
Colleagues will forgive a grainy picture, but not a booming mic sound from across the room. A mic near your mouth is the cheapest meeting upgrade there is.
Music from your laptop, and when the phone rings, the headphones switch to the call on their own. A feature your headphones probably have — turned off.
Slack has a conversation with just you — a private space for notes, links, and half-written messages, synced between your computer and phone.
Slack and Teams can both send a message later — an arrow next to the send button, or a right-click. Write the idea down now, don't disturb your colleague.
Read a message on your phone at the bus stop and now there's no trace of it at work? Alt+click puts it back among the unread. And Esc, the opposite way, clears a whole channel.
Sharing your full desktop shows colleagues your notifications and half-typed messages too. Sharing one window shows only what you meant to show.
Space
Stay muted for the whole meeting. When you want to say something, hold the key, talk, release — and the microphone mutes itself again.
During a slideshow, type a slide number and press Enter — you're there. No clicking back through twenty slides in front of an audience.
Can't grab an object buried under an image with your mouse? The Selection Pane lists every element on the slide — pick by clicking in the list, not by hunting on the canvas.
Presentation is 80 MB and won't go through email? Built-in image compression shrinks it to a fraction of the size — two clicks, no visible loss.
Ctrl+D
Duplicate an object, move it into place — and the next Ctrl+D copies with the same offset built in. A row of evenly spaced elements in seconds.
Need to send three pages out of a fifty-page PDF? Print the range “12-14” to PDF and the new file is born. No installing anything.
Highlighting and annotating a PDF is handled by the free Acrobat Reader, Edge, and Preview on Mac. Feedback belongs in the file, not in a five-paragraph email.
Type @name in the body of an email — Outlook adds the person to the recipients automatically and highlights that something's expected of them. No more overlooked tasks buried in the CC line.
Most people sit in their chair exactly as it arrived from the store. Three checkpoints — elbows at desk height, knees at a right angle, feet on the floor — take a minute to fix.
Default pointer and scroll-wheel speed is tuned for monitors from a decade ago. Two sliders save hundreds of arm movements a day.
A verification text arrives and Safari on your Mac offers it right in the field to fill in — the phone stays in your pocket. Just turn on message forwarding.
Fn+Q
An idea or a phone call in the middle of work? Fn+Q brings up a floating note over whatever you're doing — and it saves itself to Notes.
Drag a document you have open straight into an email or chat using the small icon in the window's title bar — no hunting for the file in Finder.
You don't need to hunt through special character tables for accented letters on a Mac — hold a letter down and a menu of all its accented variants pops up.
Your Mac's built-in camera is mediocre. Just set your iPhone near the monitor and the Mac offers it as a webcam — wirelessly, with nothing to install.
Your Mac sees your iPhone's hotspot right in the Wi-Fi menu, even when it's off on the phone. One click and you're online — no touching your phone.
Your Mac can receive and dial calls from your iPhone. The phone can stay on the charger in the hallway while you talk through your computer's headset.
Cmd+Shift+/
Not sure where an app hides a certain feature? This shortcut opens menu search, finds the command by name, and points an arrow at where it lives.