When working in Microsoft Word 2010, don’t forget these handy tips and tricks to get something done quickly or to format your text more in a more pleasing way.

• Press Ctrl+Enter to start a new page. A manual page break is inserted, which forces a new page automatically.
• Press Shift+Enter to insert a soft return, which is useful for breaking a line of text, such as in a document title or an address.
• Use tabs to line up your text. Never use spaces. One tab is all you need. If you’re typing more than one tab, you need to reset the tab stops.
• Always use one tab between columns to line them up. That makes editing the information easier if you have to do it.
• If you need to change page formatting in the middle of your document, start a new section.
• Save your styles in a template! That way, you can use them for new documents you create without having to rebuild all your styles over and over.

Once in a while, you might need to insert an unusual character or symbol into your Word 2010 document. For those special times, refer to the following table.

Inserting Special Characters in Word 2010

Once in a while, you might need to insert an unusual character or symbol into your Word 2010 document. Or depending on your work, you might save time every day by using these shortcut combinations.

If you’re an iPhone user you’ll have noticed that it’s battery lasts about as long as a celebrity marriage – nifty new features and apps aren’t much use if your phone’s dead.

We’ve put together a list of the top tweaks and tricks to get more life out of your battery.

Battery low and need a quick charge before you head out of the office – or off for a night out with your mates? A favourite trick we use here at Directions is to switch your phone into flight mode while it’s charging. This automatically turns off a bunch of power sucking features and gets your phone charged in double time.

Here’s our top tips for you to get the most from your battery.

Location, Location, Location
The biggest battery drain culprit is Apple’s location awareness. Reminders, Find My Friends, and the underlying software that allows Foursquare to do creepy/neat things like remind you to stop at a nearby cafe. No matter how you’re using it, your new iPhone is using its GPS and cellular powers to find itself in the world way more often than ever before. That’s a big drain for your battery. Luckily, you can turn a lot of it off.
To start, go into Location Settings, found in the main Settings list. You’ll see a long rundown of every app on your phone that might take a little bite out of your battery. Some make a lot of sense (Maps) while some make zero sense at all (Angry Birds). Use your judgment. Weather is a real killer — it’ll hunt for your location every time you drop down the ‘Notification Center’ to give you local forecasts. It’s cool, but horrible on your charge.
Now let’s dig deeper — at the very bottom of the list is a brand new button labelled System Services. Hit it.

• Turn off Diagnostics & Usage (Information about how and where you’re using your phone, sent automatically to Apple)
• Turn off Location-Based iAds
• Setting Time Zone (Unless you’re flying to a different country every other day, you probably don’t need your phone to constantly see if you’ve moved nations and setting the time zone accordingly)

To turn Location Services off completely – Find it in Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services -> Slide to Off

Fetch Email Less Often, Turn Data Push Off
The iPhone can be set to automatically suck email and other data down to it or, for some kinds of accounts, have data pushed out to it whenever new data becomes available. You’re probably realized by now that accessing wireless networks costs you battery life, so turning data push off, and thus reducing the number of times your phone connects to the network, will extend your battery’s life. With push off, you’ll need to set your email to check periodically or do it manually (see the next tip for more on this).
Find it in Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendar -> Fetch New Data -> Slide to Off

The less often your phone accesses a network, the less battery it uses. Save battery life by setting your phone to check your email accounts less often. Try checking every hour or, if you’re really serious about saving battery, manually. Manual checks means you’ll never have email waiting for you on your phone, but you’ll also stave off the red battery icon.
Find it in Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendar -> Fetch New Data -> Select Your Preference

Autolock Sooner
You can set your iPhone to automatically go to sleep – a feature known as Auto-Lock – after a certain amount of time. The sooner it sleeps, the less power is used to run the screen or other services. Try setting Auto-Lock to 1 or 2 minutes.
Find it in Settings -> General -> Auto-Lock -> Tap your Preference

The Usual Suspects
Some battery tips will always work. Don’t forget about the tried and true methods: Turn down screen brightness, keep Bluetooth and Wi-Fi off, and switch off 3G data if you don’t need your data connection.

Condition Your Battery
Batteries are like muscles. They need to be worked a bit before they’re at peak condition. You can get big gains by draining your battery to almost empty, then letting it charge all the way back up to 100 percent.

If you use Outlook 2010 or 2013, then you might have noticed a feature called the ‘Social Connector’. The Outlook Social Connector connects people you communicate with or have stored in your contacts folder in Outlook 2010 with their profiles on a number of different social networks.

This can be a very useful feature – but it also has some downsides. Check this quick guide to make sure you understand the benefits…..and the pitfalls.

The Good Bits

Increasingly, its via social networks we find out if someone has a new job or if someone has an updated phone number.  Despite having our “friends” or “connections” in our social networks most of us have contact details to our friends, family, colleagues and business partners in our Outlook contact directory, or some other address book application.  The Outlook Social Connector connects your Outlook contact directory with your social network list of friends and business contacts to give you all information in one place – Outlook.

In Outlook 2010 you have something called the “People Pane”. This pane is visible at the bottom of email and contact cards. By default the People Pane is minimized, you can expand the People Pane by clicking the arrow in the bottom right corner.

Even if you are not connected to a person, you can still see the profile picture of that person if they have set their profile as “public” on the social network, however you will never see any updates from that person. In order to see updates from the person you need to be connected to the person on the network, or the person has to have a setting in their profile which makes his or her updates public. The Outlook Social Connector uses the same security settings as the social network web site.

You can ask to connect to a person directly from Outlook by clicking on the green plus sign and selecting the social network you want to connect through. You can be  connected to a person through several social networks. You will see a logo next to the green plus sign for each network where you are connected. You can see the profile pictures from each network by clicking the white arrows in the People Pane profile picture.  If you click on one of the social network icons, the profile of the person will open up in a browser so that you can see more information about the person.

Oversharing?

Do you “friend” work colleagues on Facebook? Then you’re now in danger of oversharing.

Here’s how it works. You send your colleagues a meeting agenda, and in the window below the message they see your profile picture and status updates from the social network sites where you are “friends.” That Farmville update from a few minutes ago. Party pictures on Facebook from the weekend before. And if your LinkedIn account is tied to Twitter, they’ll also see your tweets.

So if you haven’t already, you might want to think about putting all of your work colleagues into one group in Facebook (access by clicking on “Friends” and the then “Create a List”) and editing your privacy settings to suit.

Also, keep in mind that your Facebook profile picture will show up in the Social Connector pane – so keep this in mind and choose an appropriate photo.

Did you know that you can quickly fill cells in Excel with common data patterns (for example 1…100 or Jan…Dec)?

This feature, called Auto Fill, and isn’t just for numeric information. Excel can create predefined lists for you. For example, days of the week, months of the year, 1st qtr. 2nd qtr. etc. You can also have Excel list numerically by various increments (2,4,6,8… or 5,10,15,20…).

You can even create your own custom lists.  Consider the worksheet shown in Figure 1. To copy the formula in cell H8 down to cells H9 through H20, you can double-click the Fill Handle in cell H8. Doing so causes the formula and formatting to copy as long as there is an entry in the adjacent column – in this case, column G. This is perhaps the fastest way of copying the formula down the range.

Figure 1 – Using the Fill Handle to Copy a Formula

However, as shown in Figure 2, using the Fill Handle to copy the formula also copied the cell formats; in this case adding an unwanted “$” to cells H9 through H20. Most users would now manually edit the formats to remove the unwanted character; however, with Excel’s Auto Fill Options, that is unnecessary.

Figure 2 – Using the Fill Handle Automatically Copies Formats Also

Notice the Auto Fill Options icon encircled in Figure 3. Clicking this icon opens the Auto Fill Options dialog box. In this case, the dialog presents three options: 1) Copy Cells (the default setting, which includes copying formats), 2) Fill Formatting Only (which copies only cell formatting), and 3) Fill Without Notice the Auto Fill Options icon encircled in Figure 3. Clicking this icon opens the Auto Fill Options dialog box. In this case, the dialog presents three options: 1) Copy Cells (the default setting, which includes copying formats), 2) Fill Formatting Only (which copies only cell formatting), and 3) Fill Without Formatting (which copies the cell entry, without copying the formatting). In this example, choosing Fill Without Formatting provides the desired result.

Figure 3 – Using Auto Fill Options to Control Formatting When Copying

See that Auto Fill Options are context sensitive. For example, in Figure 4, clicking and dragging the Fill Handle associated with the two dates on the left generated the results on the right side of the screenshot. What if you did not want weekend days to appear in the resulting data range? You could use Auto Fill Options to achieve this objective.

Figure 4 – Using the Fill Handle to Enter Dates in Excel

Immediately upon clicking and dragging to create the entry of all dates – including weekend dates – click the Auto Fill Options icon and choose Fill Weekdays as shown in Figure 5. As you can see, doing so fills in dates, but omits any weekend days.

Figure 5 – Using Auto Fill Options to Enter Weekdays Only

Excel’s Auto Fill Options provide a powerful set of tools when filling in ranges of data. They are context sensitive and do change depending upon the nature of the selected data. Get acquainted with these tools to reduce the amount of time you spend filling data ranges.

BlackBerry is hoping that its new software platform and the long awaited Z10 smartphone will help the one-time corporate darling regain its mojo, in a new age of services. After a tough five years which has seen its global market share slip to 4.6 per cent, a tenth of what it had in 2008, BlackBerry is in desperate need for a makeover. That makeover isn’t just about changing the name from Research In Motion (RIM) to BlackBerry but also rebranding itself as a services company.

via BlackBerry’s service ambitions | Business Spectator.

When things get to hectic at work, you can walk away from the coffee machine and return to your space. If you’re lucky enough to have an office, you can even shut the door. But, what do you do with Outlook conversations that aren’t important to you? Even if you opt not to read them, you still have to delete them. There’s good news; you don’t have to read or even delete irrelevant conversations. Outlook lets you completely ignore them. Outlook 2010 lets you completely ignore an email conversation with a simple click or two of the mouse.

Before we show you how to ignore a conversation, let’s make sure you know what a conversation is. Microsoft defines a conversation as follows: A Conversation is the complete chain of email messages from the first message through all responses. The messages of a Conversation have the same subject. You might be more familiar with the term ‘thread’.

Now, here’s how to ignore a conversation:

1. Select the message in the Reading pane.
2. Click the Home tab, and click Ignore in the Delete group, or press [Ctrl]+[Delete], or right-click the message and choose Ignore from the resulting context menu.
3. Click Ignore Conversation.

That’s it – that’s a lot easier than wading through all those unwanted messages!

This quick solution will remove all emails belonging to this conversation from your Inbox (or folder). But there’s more! Outlook will automatically detour new messages in that conversation, so it never even hits your Inbox.

The conversation’s not really gone and you can easily reclaim it, as follows:

1. Select the Deleted Items folder.
2. Select any message in the conversation that you want to recover.
3. Click Ignore in the Delete group.
4. Click Stop Ignoring Conversation.

When you stop ignoring a conversation, Outlook will move all messages in the conversation back to your Inbox. In addition, you’ll start seeing new messages in your Inbox as they arrive.

Google is shutting down its popular RSS Reader as part of a broader "spring cleaning" to concentrate on a smaller selection of services.

In a post on the official blog for Google Reader, software engineer Alan Green cites declining usage and a reshaped focus on fewer products. "We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience," he says.

via Google Reader shutting down in July.

Google has launched indoor maps in Australia allowing users to find their way around inside airports, shopping centres, train stations and other large buildings using their mobile devices.

Australian engineers at firms such as Navisens, CSIRO and UNSW are leading the world in developing advanced indoor navigation technology capable of helping people locate specific products on supermarket shelves, tracking athletes’ performance or guiding the visually impaired.

via Google Maps Indoor Technology | Map Indoors | Photos.

Brisbane can absorb up to 450 hotel rooms every year for the next 10 years before reaching its capacity.

“This is equivalent to more than 1100 jobs and $106 million in economic activity for the city, which is why it is an absolute priority for Brisbane.’’

via Hotel shortage hits Brisbane's hip pocket.

Set your locations.

Be sure to enter your home and work addresses in Contacts. That way, Siri can remind you to do things when you leave or arrive at either place.

via Apple – iPhone 4S – Learn some helpful iPhone tips and tricks..