It’s easy to open up far more tabs on your web browser than you need, especially when so many tools are cloud-based. If you find yourself in need of a quick way to close all other tabs besides a handful or so, we’ve got just the tip for you. You can close all open tabs to the right of your preferred window, or you can close all tabs outright.

The holidays are fast approaching and that means people are going to miss work for one reason or another. If you can get away from the office for a little bit, you’ll want to set up an out-of-office message to ensure that others know you will get back to them when you get back to the office. Here’s how you can set up an autoresponder for an out-of-office message in Microsoft Outlook.

How often does this scenario happen to you? You’re going about your workday and are being quite productive, when all of a sudden you close the wrong tab in your web browser, putting an end to your productivity. This isn’t crippling downtime or anything, but it’s an inconvenience that we know you can do without. Thankfully, modern web browsers let you reopen closed tabs or windows to get back to where you left off.

Introducing Chrome Actions

Chrome Actions take the familiar address bar of the Chrome Internet browser and add some extra utility to it. Rather than specifying a webpage or network location to visit in the address bar (known as the “omnibar” to very few of us), Chrome now accepts very basic commands as input, and will follow these commands when they are entered.

Business Doesn’t Stop, But You Should

We’ve all been there. We’re driving or on the train and a phone call comes in that you absolutely have to take. What do you do? Most people will take the call, but the right thing to do is send it to voicemail and return the call as soon as possible. Why? Because you are distracted. It’s best to call back and give the caller the attention they deserve rather than trying to juggle a phone call in the middle of traffic. Okay, this one is pretty basic, but it’s the foundation of all mobile etiquettes.

Labels

Instead of categorizing your notes into folders and notebooks, Keep is organized by labels. You can create labels to find everything you have stored on a particular topic. Fortunately, it's also easy to use, so in this tip I'll show you how to use Google Keep to track all the important information you need to process and store.

Let’s go over how to set up this capability. As a disclaimer, it will require you to edit some of your menu options, so reach out to your IT resource to confirm that it is okay to do so and to assist you if need be.

You should also know that Track Changes won’t work if a spreadsheet contains a table that hasn’t been converted into a range. To make this conversion, select the table, navigate to the Design tab, and click the Convert to Range option. If you want others to be able to collaborate on your workbook, it needs to be saved in a shared location.

Mobile Device Use

When working from home, the reasonable threshold for mobile device use is significantly different. Theoretically, you could talk to someone on speakerphone with the phone across the room (although you shouldn’t). However, there are other people with you in the office that you could potentially distract.

Explaining Google Lens

Downloadable from the Google Play Store, Google Lens is a utility app that incorporates artificial intelligence to make your smartphone’s capability to take and store images even more useful. With Google Lens, your phone can identify the elements in an image and give the user in-depth and contextual options based on it. Let’s say you wanted to find out what the flowers were that someone had planted outside their house. Using Google Lens, you could point your camera at the flowers and identify them that way.

Screen Rotating Too Much? Lock It in Place!

How often have you been in the middle of doing something, only to shift your phone’s position and have your screen switch orientation as it calibrates to what it assumes is what you are looking for? It doesn’t take long for this to get old, and quick.

Strategic Placement

Wi-Fi depends on a couple of pieces of hardware and a couple of other factors. Firstly, ensure that your modem is connected correctly and that your router is connected securely to your modem. Nowadays, they are typically found in the same unit for home use. A key factor to setting up your router is that it has as few obstructions between devices as possible. Wi-Fi is just wireless radio waves, so ensuring it has a clear path will help the reliability of the signal that gets to your devices. 

Improving Your Google Queries

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If you want to tell Google to omit certain potential results from your search, you can use the hyphen/subtraction mark to define what you don’t want considered.

Excessive Permissions

Data security is a priority for many people, but even amongst them, mobile applications often aren’t even considered a potential threat to their data. While you should ever only download applications from an official application store, some attacks can potentially slip through the vetting process to be distributed via these means. Therefore, it is important to carefully consider every application you have installed and the permissions that each one demands. If these permissions seem excessive for the application’s needs, reconsider if the app is necessary to use (chances are, it isn’t). This helps protect you against the tactic that many cybercriminals use: getting a harmless app to the store, and then turning it malicious with an update once it is downloaded.

Quick and Easy Tables

Let’s face it—a spreadsheet full of points and figures isn’t the most comprehensive way to view your data. It is far better to instead format that data into a table, as you can then reorganize it and filter it as needed. Once your data is in a spreadsheet, creating a table is as simple as selecting one of your cells, pressing Ctrl + T, and then hitting Enter.

Dictate Your Environment

One of the psychological keys to effectively working from home is to identify a certain area as the at-home workplace and stick to it. Preferably, this workplace is away from the distractions of the kitchen and its snacks or the bedroom and its temptation of a nap. Once you have found your area, make sure that you have it equipped with the tools you will need to be productive, like a laptop, external monitor, and any other accessories you use.

Figure Out Where and How You Work Most Effectively

As you work from home, it will help to establish one area of your living space as the area where work is to be done and commit to working there. Pick a spot that isn’t going to serve as an additional distraction (as the snacks of the kitchen and the temptation of a nap in the bedroom would serve) and claim that area as your productive workspace. Make sure that you have all the tools that you will need for your work in that area—from a laptop, an additional monitor, and any other peripherals that you will need for your tasks.

If you use the selection of tools that Google offers as a part of its G Suite offering, you’ve probably found a few documents that you find yourself repeatedly returning to on a regular basis. Rather than navigating to them via the appropriate folder hierarchy in Google Drive, there is a simple shortcut that you can take advantage of in Google Chrome: creating a bookmark that navigates directly to the appropriate page.

1.  Use the Best Tool for the Job

Your contacts should never find it difficult to reach you, so you need to make sure you’re providing them with plenty of options for them to make contact. Don’t pick between a phone number or an email address, give them both, along with a live chat feature, conferencing options, and other forms of communication. Making use of things like a blog and social media give you a great way to reach out to them first, starting the conversation.

#1: Interact with it less.

As we established from the very start, email can very rapidly shift from an asset to a considerable time commitment, often multiple times throughout the workday. If possible, avoid getting drawn in by reducing the total amount of time you spend in your mailbox. There are a few ways to accomplish this:

Instant Messaging

Instant messaging is a handy utility for any team to have at their disposal for the brief messages that coworkers must send to one another throughout the day. Not only is it more efficient than checking and responding to endless emails throughout the day, it allows the message’s recipient to stay more focused on their task. After all, instant messaging and texting has hardwired us to switch more efficiently between tasks when we deal with these kinds of quick messages.