Tips & tricks

Which tab is that playing from? Find it and mute it

The tab that's making sound gives itself away with a little speaker icon — and in Edge and Firefox, one click on it mutes it.

.new addresses: a blank document in one second

Type docs.new or sheets.new into your browser — and a new document opens right away. word.new and excel.new from Microsoft work too.

Comparing two versions of a document: see the changes in color

Word and Google Docs can both compare two versions of a file and highlight every difference. No more reading contracts line by line.

AutoCorrect as a shortcut dictionary: long names from three letters

Teach Word that “dph” means “value added tax.” AutoCorrect can expand your own custom shortcuts across every Office app.

Bold, italics, and lists: WhatsApp can format text

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.

Stop sites from asking about notifications

The “This site wants to show notifications” popup can be switched off globally with one toggle. Sites stop asking — and you stop dismissing them.

Install a website as an app

Gmail, your calendar, or Teams can run in their own window with an icon on the taskbar — no address bar and no risk of an accidentally closed tab.

Turn on captions during a meeting — they work in Czech too

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.

Noise suppression: the mower outside your window stays yours alone

Zoom and Teams can filter out barking, keyboard clatter, and next-door drilling. Just switch noise suppression to high in your audio settings.

Pinning in Teams: important chats stay on top, key messages above the conversation

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.

Headphones with a mic for meetings: sound matters more than the camera

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.

Multipoint: headphones connected to your computer and phone at once

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.

Message yourself in Slack: a notepad that's always open

Slack has a conversation with just you — a private space for notes, links, and half-written messages, synced between your computer and phone.

Scheduled messages: write it tonight, deliver it in the morning

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.

Alt+click in Slack: a message stays unread until you deal with it

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.

Delete an annoying suggestion from the address bar: Shift+Delete

Shift+Delete

Does your browser keep offering a typo or an old site? Select the suggestion with the arrow key and press Shift+Delete — it's gone for good.

IMPORTRANGE: connect two Google Sheets live

One function pulls data from another spreadsheet into yours — and keeps it current. No more manually copying numbers between files.

Share a window, not the whole screen

Sharing your full desktop shows colleagues your notifications and half-typed messages too. Sharing one window shows only what you meant to show.

Hold Space and talk: a walkie-talkie for Zoom and Teams

Space

Stay muted for the whole meeting. When you want to say something, hold the key, talk, release — and the microphone mutes itself again.

Jump to any slide while presenting: type the number, hit Enter

During a slideshow, type a slide number and press Enter — you're there. No clicking back through twenty slides in front of an audience.

The Selection Pane: click an object hidden under everything else

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.

Slim down a presentation: compress images right inside PowerPoint

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 in PowerPoint: a duplicate that remembers the spacing

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.

Hold the back button — jump five pages at once

Alt+←

A long press on the back arrow unfolds the tab's history. Instead of clicking back five times, jump straight to the page where you started.

Pull just a few pages out of a PDF — by printing to PDF

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.

Free PDF comments: mark up documents without paying for Acrobat

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.

The @ in Outlook: an @mention adds the recipient and flags the task

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.

A link that jumps straight to one sentence on the page

Select text, right-click, “Copy link to highlight” — the recipient lands exactly on that sentence, highlighted in yellow.

Set up your chair in a minute: elbows, knees, feet

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.

Mouse sensitivity: across two monitors with one flick of the wrist

Default pointer and scroll-wheel speed is tuned for monitors from a decade ago. Two sliders save hundreds of arm movements a day.