Tips and Tricks to make your Windows life easier

Here are a few of our favourite tips to help you increase your productivity and decrease your stress!!

Windows 7

Windows 7 has a number of useful features that make it easier to use so you can be more productive. Some of these are featured on the Windows 7 advertising campaign, and some are kept a little more secret.

Snapping

On previous versions of Windows to resize the window meant changing it from a full screen to a window, and then dragging the corners around change the shape and size. All these features are still available in Windows 7 but with a few more options.

If you have a window which does not currently take up the full screen and you want it to click on the top border and drag it to the top of the screen, the window will be resized to full screen. (You can also double click on this border to acheive the same result)

If you have a program that is full screen and you want to bring it back to a window, simply click on the top border again and drag it downwards, the window will shrink to it's previous size. (Again, this can be acheived by double clicking)

Half Screen option - If you click on the top border and drag the window to either the right or left hand side of the screen the window will be resized to take up exactly half of the screen. Do this on both sides of the screen to help you access two programs simultaneously.

Minimizing

If you want to minimize all running programs, right click on a clear area of the Task Bar at the bottom of the screen. From the menu, choose 'Show the Desktop'.

If you want to minimize all programs apart from one, click on the top border of the program you want to remain open and 'shake' it around (i.e. move it rapidly from side to side.

GodMode

Please don't shoot me for blasphemy on this one, that's just what Microsoft call this. Have you ever wondered what other things you can tweak and change within Windows 7, all the settings in the Control Panel, Preferences etc. Have you ever wondered if you could see them all together, well you can. The origins of this feature are unknown, maybe the writers of Windows 7 wanted to make it easier for themselves to get to all the settings, Microsoft may one day tell us, but for now, we'll just accept it.

Create a folder somewhere that's easy to find, in your Documents folder for instance and call it

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

You need to be accurate with the name so copy and paste it from here. Once you save it the name will be changed to GodMode and the icon associated with the folder will change. In here you will now find around 270 different options.

Office 2007

Office 2007 has a few features that can make life easier. When designing Office 2007 Microsoft's goal was to enable users to create documents easier and faster than they could in Office 2003. Some of the features though are very intensive and are designed for recent, more powerful computers. You may find that if you have an older computer that you have upgraded to Office 2007 that some of the features seem to run very slowly.

Formatting

This applies in all programs within Office. In Office 2003 you either selected your formatting settings and then typed your text or you selected the text afterwards, then make changes to the formatting and have to apply each change to see what it would look like. This could be very time consuming if you wanted to see what other fonts would look like for instance. In Office 2007, you can select the text and then when you move the mouse over the various formatting options they are applied to the text selected, including font changes, so you can quickly see what the formatting will look like.

For this reason we would recommend that if you type your document, and then apply the formatting afterwards a considerable amount of time can be saved.