Productivity – Shortcut Keys

Many of my tech tips often refer to productivity on a computer, the reason for this is that I believe that computers should allow you to do your tasks quicker and easier. I mean wasn’t that the original intent for the creation of computers to begin with? I don’t think it was to make things more difficult or more time consuming, in fact it was just the opposite. Today tip covers shortcut keys, below are two links to shortcut keys for Mac or PC:

Mac shortcut keys

PC shortcut keys

Words of Wisdom: Check where you are printing before you click print, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had users not look and end up printing to a different building on accident.

If you have time check out this great resource for educators here.

Productivity – Desktop Space

Mac: For productivity, one of the best but often overlooked feature of Mac OS X is the possibility of hiding the Dock. A fast,easy way to do this is go to the Apple in the upper left hand side of your desktop, click it, navigate to dock and enable hiding. You can also get to the Dock preferences through System preferences, there you can select to not only hide your Dock but modify the magnification and choose which side you want the dock to be on.
Here’s a screenshot of mine:

PC: You can also hide the taskbar to give you more screen real estate. Right click on the task bar, go to properties and click auto-hide.

Words of Wisdom: More screen space cn make you more productive, it’s even been written about in this article.

If you have time for an interesting article about 15 great tools for techs click here.

Productivity – Multiple Desktops

Mac: If you are running 10.5(Leopard) you can turn on Spaces to give you multiple virtual desktops. To enable Spaces go to System Preferences->Expose & Spaces and check the “Enable Spaces” checkbox. I also like to check the box “Show Spaces in Menu Bar”. After you have turned it on you can use Fn+F8 to get a bird’s eye view or control+arrow keys to move from one desktop to another. This can be really handy when you’re working on multiple projects. For me, I like to put my mail in one and work on another one, just to make getting to my mail quick and easy.

PC: Windows has an application that can give you multiple desktops, it’s an addon from Microsoft. You can download it here.

Words of Wisdom: Using keyboard shortcuts to navigate in multile desktops and multiple aplications can speed up your productivity.

Here’s a great resource for all you web designers out there.

Backups are Essential

Today’s Tech Tip of the day is pretty simple and it applies to PC, Mac, Linux or any other operating system that might be out there, it’s a basic concept that most people don’t do and regretably should.

BACKUP YOUR WORK!! Save often, make a copy of items that are really important and put them on a usb drive. Nothing is more horrifying than to realize that you accidentally deleted your word doc that you’ve been working on for a week or a presentation that you’re getting ready to show.

One note to this: Do not make copies of items in the same place. This is not a form of backup. A backup is copying your files to some other location, a usb drive, burned to a CD-ROM, copied to your local machine as well as in your server space.

The people I know that do good backups are usually only those who have lost something at some point and know the agony. Spread the word on how important backup are, be proactive instead of reactive. To make things easier on yourself you can always use syncing software to sync your USB device with your computer, this makes backups simple, easy and you won’t forget to do it. I recommend Allway Sync or MIcrosoft SyncToy.

Words of Wisdom: Before you upgrade, make a backup.

If you’re interested, here’s an interesting article about the mysterious cattywampus.