sonofsanta

For the past couple of years, barring a hiatus when I was too damned busy getting 2008R2 set up on a Hyper-V cluster with System Center, I've been writing up brief weekly tips and emailing them round to all our staff. Less than a page of A4 (usually), pointing out one small but useful tip for using a computer. It's a friendly way of reminding people we're here and slowly training staff without them realising I'm on a secret campaign to make them all more IT-literate.

It suddenly struck me the other day that I should probably share these tips with all of y'all.

So, starting today, after I've emailed round my weekly tip to the staff here on a Tuesday afternoon, I'm going to post up a tip in Word document form for others to steal, adapt and send round, because I'm lovely like that. There might be some weeks that get skipped because the tip I've sent round here was specific to our school, but otherwise I'll stick 'em all up cos someone might find it useful one day.

All of them will be written with Windows 7/Office 2010 in mind; I have got a chunk of WinXP/Office 2003 ones from a couple of years ago, though, so if anyone is still using those platforms, holla and I'll put them all up in one big chunk. (That's also why the numbering starts at 27.) EDIT: people asked, so here you go: WinXP & Office 2003 tips

And just to make this absolutely clear, you can do what you want with these files, so long as you're not making money off them because you're some sort of unscrupulous fly-by-Googler who can't write their own content. Essentially I'm posting it under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license, except I'm not bothered about attribution (although feel free to if you want).

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All that said, the first tip is ICT Tip 027 - Windows 7 Start Menu.doc, which goes over how to search the Start Menu for the program you need instead of hunting through it. Personally I can't live without it, although tempting staff away from the mouse to the keyboard is easier said than done!