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.

Shift+F5 in Word: jump to your last edit

Shift+F5

Open a document and Word dumps you at the start. Shift+F5 jumps exactly to where you last stopped writing.

Hidden formatting marks: why a document behaves strangely

Ctrl+Shift+8

The ¶ button reveals spaces, tabs, and page breaks. Suddenly you can see exactly why text jumps where it shouldn't — and what to delete.

Ctrl+Enter: a new page without hammering Enter

Ctrl+Enter

Paginating with twenty presses of Enter falls apart at the first edit. Ctrl+Enter inserts a real page break that stays put.

Alt+drag in Word: a vertical text selection

Hold Alt and drag with the mouse — Word selects a rectangle of text across lines. Perfect for deleting a column of characters that a normal selection can't grab.

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.

Ctrl+Shift+D saves every tab into a single bookmarks folder

Ctrl+Shift+D

Have to close your browser right now but you're mid-research with twenty tabs open? One shortcut saves them all as a bookmarks folder.

Stop retyping file paths: drag the file into the terminal

Dragging a file from File Explorer or Finder into a terminal window inserts its full path — correctly quoted, without a single typo.

From the terminal to File Explorer or Finder: open . and explorer.exe .

Open the current folder from the terminal in your graphical file manager with one command: “open .” on a Mac, “explorer.exe .” on Windows and in WSL.

Ctrl+R in the terminal: type a piece of a command, history finds it

Ctrl+R

You don't have to fish a long command from last week out with the up arrow. Ctrl+R searches history for any fragment and autocompletes the whole thing.

A page from computer to phone: QR code or send-to-device

You don't have to email links to yourself. Chrome generates a QR code for a page, and Chrome and Firefox can both send a tab straight to your phone.

Speed up key repeat: the cursor flies, so does deleting

Holding an arrow key or Backspace repeats at a speed you can configure. Two sliders almost nobody ever touches — and typing instantly feels snappier.

Reader mode: an article without ads or popup banners

F9

One click strips ads, menus, and recommended articles off the page. What's left is text and images — like in a book.

python -m http.server: share a folder over the network with one command

Need to get files onto another device on the same network? Python turns any folder into a downloadable web page.

Exam registration: a reminder for the exact minute it opens

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.

Free trial? Cancel it right away — it runs the full course anyway

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.

The 20-20-20 rule: your eyes need a break before you feel it

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.

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.

The parking file: unfinished work survives every interruption

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.

Closed a document without saving? Office can bring it back

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint quietly save copies of your work as you go. File → Info → Manage Document recovers even files you never saved.

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.

Your monitor can do 120 Hz but runs at 60: turn on the full refresh rate

Plenty of monitors and laptops run at 60 Hz even though the hardware can do more. One setting, and scrolling suddenly feels buttery smooth.

Rotate your second monitor to portrait: a whole page at once

A monitor rotated 90° shows a full document page, a long email, or code without endless scrolling. Windows and Mac both handle it right in settings.

Text from paper straight into a field: Live Text and Google Lens

Stop retyping details off paper. iPhone can scan text with the camera directly into a text field; Android does the same through Google Lens.

Swipe along the bottom edge: Alt+Tab for your phone

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.

Numbers without switching keyboards: slide your finger off the 123 key

On iPhone, slide your finger off the 123 key onto a digit and the keyboard snaps back to letters by itself. Gboard has a key hold or a permanent number row.

Quick Note: Fn+Q opens a sticky note anywhere in the system

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.

Moving through text on a Mac: Option and Cmd with arrow keys

Option+→

Option plus an arrow key jumps by word, Cmd jumps to the start and end of a line. Switchers from Windows type on a Mac with the handbrake on until they learn these.

Hold a key and pick a character: accented letters without hunting for them

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.