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.
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.
The school only writes to one address — and the other parent hears about meetings secondhand. A Gmail filter can auto-forward school emails to your partner.
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.
One function pulls data from another spreadsheet into yours — and keeps it current. No more manually copying numbers between files.
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.
Holding an arrow key or Backspace repeats at a speed you can configure. Two sliders almost nobody ever touches — and typing instantly feels snappier.
Clubs, dentists, and school events don't belong in your work calendar. A shared Family calendar is visible to both partners, so nothing gets lost in one person's head.
F9
One click strips ads, menus, and recommended articles off the page. What's left is text and images — like in a book.
Need to get files onto another device on the same network? Python turns any folder into a downloadable web page.
Exam slots fill up within minutes. A reminder set to the exact moment registration opens decides whether you plan your exam period, or take whatever's left.
For subscriptions through the App Store or Google Play, you can cancel the trial a minute after activating it: it still runs to the end, and nothing gets charged. Elsewhere, a reminder does the job.
A work laptop and your own computer on one desk doesn't have to mean two keyboards. A USB switch flips between them with a single button.
After 20 minutes at a screen, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. The eye muscles relax and you skip the dry, burning eyes come evening.
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.
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.
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.
A contract, an attachment, and a scanned addendum, all in one file: Preview handles it on a Mac, free PDF24 on Windows — just don't upload sensitive documents anywhere.
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.
Chrome, Edge, and Firefox can all fill in a PDF form directly. And when the form has no fillable fields, Edge and Firefox just let you type the text straight onto it.
Before a meeting or a coworker pulls you away, write one sentence: what you're doing and what the next step is. Coming back then takes seconds, not a quarter hour.
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.
Select text, right-click, “Copy link to highlight” — the recipient lands exactly on that sentence, highlighted in yellow.