Two Vista Tips To Enhance Your Productivity
ByWhat can your operating system do for you? If you have Vista, there are quite a few handy, time saving things it can help you with. It’s just having the time to discover all of them. So, here are two of my top tips that hopefully you will remember or give it a try right away. I find doing something myself a couple times reinforces things and I’ll remember it.
Instant Search Feature
This little feature is my absolute favorite! Instead of taking time to go to start>all programs and begin searching amongst all the programs on your computer, just type in what you’re looking for right after you click the start button. This works for finding & starting up both programs and finding documents or even a particular email.
Find Recently Edited Documents
Do you have days where you just can’t remember where you saved a file you worked on recently? Oh yes, I have a folder system set up that works pretty well for me, but there are some times that a document gets mis-filed or something odd happens and then I’m trying to locate it quickly! Vista has a nifty feature that will quickly find all the documents you’ve worked on yesterday, earlier in the week, last week, and so on.
Here’s how:
Open the Documents folder (or whatever folder you want to search), click the little down-arrow next to the Date modified column header. A little box will pop up. Then choose ‘stack by date modified’ and all your documents from the previous day will be lined up for you to see or open. There are other choices as well. You can click ‘group’, and your documents, pictures, etc. will all be grouped by date and you can scroll down the list to see how productive you’ve been! Another useful feature is the calendar that pops up when you click on the down-arrow. If you know the date you worked on an important document, use the forward/backward arrow to quickly scroll to the date you need, click on it and documents from only that date will appear. What a potential life-saver that could be!
There are many books written about Vista and I’ve thumbed through a couple of them. While looking around on the internet, I found this site by Korough Ghazi called TweakGuides. He has a free e-book download that contains Vista tips written in plain English. You might want to check that out here.
