While you might have several years of experience using computers, there are yet numerous ways to sharpen your skills on the PC and boost your productivity. These small yet impactful tips and tricks can not only help you streamline your tasks but also save you considerable time and efforts hence significantly enhance your productivity.
Undo Your Last Action
Somewhat surprising but it’s true that you can undo nearly any action in any standard Windows Application in Windows. You probably know that pressing Ctrl + Z will undo anything you just typed, but this also holds true for everything else. For example, if you accidentally moved or deleted a file, hitting Ctrl+Z will bring it right back to its original location. Also if you’re working, say in a graphics editor and you accidentally removed some of your recent work or added some weird graphics looks, you can undo it right away by using Ctrl+Z. Moreover, you can redo anything you just undid by pressing Ctrl + Y.
Delimit the Number of Apps Running at Startup
If your PC is taking too much time to boot, it could be because you have too many programs running at startup. Fortunately you can reduce them by allowing your PC to launch faster.
- Access the Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc
- Click the Startup tab.
- Highlight the program you want to exclude from Startup and Right-click on it and click the Disable button.
- Repeat the above steps one by one on other programs you wish to exclude.
Accidentally Closed a Tab? Bring It Back
While surfing the web if you closed a tab by mistake, don’t worry, you can bring it back by simply pressing Ctrl + Shift + T and get back to what you were doing. You can press this key combination multiple times to bring back closed tabs one by one. Pretty cool!
Emoji Keyboard
The emoji keyboard provided by Windows is a convenient tool incorporated into the operating system – allowing users to easily insert emojis into their text across various applications. Accessible via a simple shortcut (Win + . or Win + ;), this feature opens a small, user-friendly panel where users can browse through and select from a wide range of emojis. The keyboard includes categories such as smiley faces, animals, food and drink, celebration, travel, objects, symbols, and flags – making it easy to find the perfect emoji to convey emotions, ideas, or sentiments. Moreover, the panel includes a search bar, enabling users to quickly locate specific emojis by typing relevant keywords. So launch the emoji keyboard and click through the emojis and see how cool they look after having selected.
Paste the Plain Text Only of Copied Content
Copy/Paste or Ctrl+C – Ctrl+V activity is the most used feature in the computing world.
When you copy text from a source, most programs will also bring any formatting from the original content and that’s quite intuitive. But there are times when you only want the plain text to be pasted excluding any associated formatting. In Windows, you can paste unformatted plain text by simply pressing Ctrl + Shift + V instead of the standard Ctrl + V. However, these tricks do not work for Notepad. Instead, pressing Ctrl + Alt + V will show a “Paste special” dialog box while Ctrl + Spacebar will remove formatting in the already pasted text.
Password-protect Your Precious Files
Windows doesn’t provide a direct mechanism to protect your files but there’s a hack. By and large, everybody uses a file compression utility these days; WinRAR and 7-Zip are pretty common. If you’ve for instance, installed a copy of WinRAR, you can create a new archive of one or more files. Now click Set Password button and from within “Enter Password” dialogue box provide the password you want to set and click Ok. Click Ok on the main dialogue window and your archive will be built in a few seconds. Upon finish, you’ll see your archive file name. When you right-click it to extract the original file it will prompt for the password, provide the password and you’re done, but don’t forget to delete the original file from here and then from the Recycle Bin.
Rename Files Sequentially in Windows
There are times when you have tens or hundreds of files having very different names but originated from the same source. For instance, you may have copies of WhatsApp images in your PC in a specific directory. May be they belong to a memorable event. The default naming-convention of the source auto-set names like “WhatsApp Image 2024-04-02 at 7.55.59 PM.jpeg” doesn’t describe the event as desired. There’s a simple tip to rename all of these files with single name through a couple of steps.
- Select all the files you want to rename
- Right-click on the first one in the selected list
- Choose Rename from the context menu, and type in the name you want to set for all files.
- This will automatically change the names of all the files with the same root name with a suffix: (1), (2) and so on.
- Hence the file names will be like TechTideSummit2024 (1).jpeg, TechTideSummit2024 (2).jpeg, TechTideSummit2024 (3).jpeg
