524 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint quietly save copies of your work as you go. File → Info → Manage Document recovers even files you never saved.
Select text, right-click, “Copy link to highlight” — the recipient lands exactly on that sentence, highlighted in yellow.
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.
No need to dig through settings: swiping on a notification on iPhone offers an hour of silence; holding one on Android turns off just the annoying category.
Swiping right along the bottom edge of the screen switches to your previous app — on iPhone and on Android with gesture navigation. No app switcher needed.
Android can trigger battery saver by percentage. iPhone has no built-in schedule — but a Shortcuts automation turns on Low Power Mode entirely on its own.
iPhone offers to share the password automatically as soon as someone nearby tries to connect. Android generates a QR code that scans and connects.
A long press on an icon opens a shortcut menu: new email, selfie, private tab, navigate home. One tap instead of hunting inside the app.
Do Not Disturb doesn't have to be a gamble. Chosen people and repeated calls always get through — so you can finally turn it on without the guilt.
Google Messages sends a text at a scheduled time when you hold down the send button. iPhone does the same in iMessage via Send Later.
Looking for where to turn on the hotspot or turn off vibration? Type it into the Settings search bar — you'll land right on the correct screen.
Tap the space bar twice at the end of a sentence — your phone inserts a period and a space, then capitalizes the next sentence. iPhone and Android.
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.