Recent Blogs Posts

I have been really lax with this, sorry. Missed last week and late this week. Can you tell that I've hit the traditional pre-Summer ramping up of work?

#40 gets skipped out as it was only relevant internally, so on to #41 - a simple one that you and I couldn't live without, yet remains a mystery to most: ICT Tip 041 - Using Tab to move between input fields.doc

Nevermore will you struggle to bite your tongue as a user types out their username, then reaches for the mouse, overshoots the password box, ...

Completely forgot to put this up on Tuesday. Sorry

We're skipping #38 (which was about our school Twitter feed) and going straight to ICT Tip 039 - Full Screen in IE.doc, aka "The F11 Key"

Share it/use it/don't sell it!

This is the killer feature in Windows 7 as far as I'm concerned. This and the searchable Start Menu.

It's simple, but I use it dozens of times a day. It's quick. It's effective. It's listed in the title of this blog post, completely undermining any attempted suspense. It is, of course, the wonder of ICT Tip 037 - Aero Snap.doc!

A lot of people have no idea that this exists, despite it being useful for nearly everyone. Send it out. Tell them. Share the joy of knowledge. Just ...

Our staff loved this one. Personally I've never used the gesture much - too much in the habit of Win+D then Alt+Tab - but people were at first disbelieving and then endlessly amused. Says something about school staff that, perhaps.

So for the entertainment and delight of your peers, here's ICT Tip 036 - Aero Shake.doc

Any monetary tips you get from people, let me know and I'll pass you my PayPal details. Not that you should be charging money for these anyway, of course - ...

Dead easy one this one. It got frustrating watching people minimise every window in sight when I asked them to go to a shortcut on the desktop, so I went off and wrote up ICT Tip 035 - Show the Desktop.doc

Do what you will with it, so long as you make no profit (unless you make some and send it all to me, that's fine )

Sorry, bit delayed as I only finished up my tip for here late yesterday afternoon so ran out of time to post this; then I got busy this morning and, well, it's now a day late. Sorry.

Anyway! This tip may or may not be overly relevant to you, as it depends on how you've configured your environment; still, it should be a starting point. ICT Tip 033 - Quick Navigation with the Start Menu.doc

Steal/adapt/re-use/redistribute, but no charging money. Not sure how much you'd get, mind.

Continuing on closely from last time, we're going into a bit more detail on the Windows 7 search tool - how to search for a file based on the content inside it. Useful when every document you save is in the format Doc1 - new version - really new version - USE THIS ONE - old.docx

You'd think I'd worked in education for five years, watching staff and students alike using just this naming scheme.

ICT Tip 032 - Searching by File Content.doc

Steal/reuse/remix/share, but profit ...

Apologies for the lateness on this one, real life rather got in the way this end. I've just managed to send out a tip round here, so it's time I posted another one up here for your pleasure.

This one follows on quite closely from last week's tip on pinning shortcuts to the Start Menu; this week it's ICT Tip 029 - Recent Documents in Win7.doc. The thinking being that you can pin your most used applications, then pin the most used documents in that application.

We noticed that a number of ...

This being a new blog series I figured I was meant to update on time and stick to my promises for at least another three weeks

So, following on from last week's introduction and tip on searching the Windows 7 Start Menu, this week is about pinning shortcuts to the Start Menu for quick access: ICT Tip 028 - Pin to Start Menu.doc

It's quick, it's easy, it's worth showing people. As ever you are free to steal, borrow, adapt and re-use, without attribution, so long as you make no ...

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 ...