This week’s tip focuses on the power of LinkedIn . Some people use it as their system of managing customer and partner contacts. Some find new employment by schmoozing their network – some even use it as the launchpad for their next career. Hands up who’s ever thought that a work colleague suddenly connecting...

One attribute of your phone is that it tends to be with you all the time , so it makes a great place to store information that you want to get access to when you’re out and about – the details of your car insurer, the password for your online banking site, your frequent flyer numbers etc. The long-established...

At a recent “Love It” internal event hosted in Microsoft UK’s Reading campus, a whole series of tips and tricks were shared amongst other Microsofties. Did you know, for example, that with an application called ZipApp ( www.zipapp.co.uk – check it out), you can build a Windows 8 app in a few minutes...

A short and sharp tip this week, courtesy of Louis Lazarus , concerning the way the New Office handles template files… and how to configure search in Outlook 2013 to be a bit more fullsome. See more templates online , and now, over to Louis… When you create a new document in Office 2013 with Word, Excel...

For years now, SkyDrive has offered a chunk of online storage to anyone who wanted to use it, if they had a Windows Live (aka Hotmail, MSN Messenger, .NET Passport & others) user ID. Adding Windows Live Mesh to the mix gave the ability to not just store and share stuff online, but be able to back...

Everyone should know about SkyDrive - the free Microsoft service that gives users with a Live ID (including MSN, Hotmail etc) a 25Gb storage space online, accessible ostensibly from anywhere? Well, it's just been made more convenient to access SkyDrive files from mobile devices, thanks to SkyDrive Mobile...

Internet Explorer 8 added a concept known as IE " Accelerators " - the principle being that you could select some text on a page, and using an accelerator, quickly search the web for that piece of text, or maybe do something more specific. The other day, I was talking to someone about a particular piece...

We've covered Microsoft Tag before on Tip o' the Week, but it's worth paying another visit as a few things have changed. Tag is an innovative 2D barcode which can be in colour or black and white, and can even be heavily stylised and worked into logos or other graphics. If you haven't tried using Tag...

It’s been a little while since we dug into Internet Explorer in the Tip of the Week, so I figured it would be worth revisiting. Previous tips included some basics in #64 and #65 and there are others. Docking & Undocking tabs Have you ever found a time when you’ve got two tabs open in IE9, and you...

Now then, now then… Remember the old 1980’s Jimmy Savill advert for British Rail? RIP, Jingle Jangle Jim. Well, it  seem that National Rail Enquiries adopted the Age of IE9 to deliver one of their latest consumer-facing web applications. Head over to http://ie9.nationalrail.co.uk to check out live...

Here’s a quick but useful tip for Bing Maps (did you know, by the way, that you can jump straight to the maps by entering www.bingmaps.com as the URL? Or if you’ve super-efficient, just type bingmaps into the address bar on IE, and press CTRL+ENTER and it will do the rest for you). If...

We covered using Windows Live Mesh to synchronise OneNote files between computers in ToW #52 , but overlooked one really simple but useful check-box capability – the ability to sync your IE favourites between PCs, and to sync your Office settings too. Jamie Burgess suggested this would be worth covering...

An earlier Tip o’ the Week featured “ 5 Golden Rules ” for OCS and Lync conferencing, and those tips still stand. If you host or participate in a Lync conference, you can dial-in to the meeting from a phone as well as joining from your PC – eg for Microsoft-hosted Lync conferences, attendees can find...

This tip was originally written shortly after the release of Internet Explorer 9, however it’s still valid today. IE9 is the fastest, most modern and most secure browser we’ve ever made (some would say, that anyone has made – recent independent analysis from NSS Labs shows IE9 blocking the vast majority...

Another tip from  Bing’s Tony Young this week. Remember kids, Bing Maps is not just for mapping. Tony wants to show you how you can use Bing maps to help you plan your day on the road… If you are travelling to a new destination  (as long as you’re in London, Manchester, Aberdeen or Glasgow...

This week, a couple of smart tips concerning Windows Phone 7. Both revolve around finding something – in one case, how to find your phone if you’re not sure where you left it, and the other, how to remind yourself where you’re going. Dude, where’s my phone...? This tip uses the location services built...

After the first year of ToWs, let’s start the 2nd with a short celebration of a cool feature in OneNote – not revolutionary, but the kind of thing that makes one smile when encountering it – somebody really thought about how OneNote was likely being used. Try typing a sum – like 52x1045= (that’s the...

As well as serving us up a daily delight by way of its home page image, Bing continues to add and innovate other interesting and useful ways to help us find information. There are many examples of where a 10-second Bing search could save time or provide a little more information that could alter the...

Following on from ToW #9 , regarding delaying sending email, this week’s episode was asked for by another reader, since he eagle-eyed-ly spotted that the email was send on one date but didn’t arrive in his inbox until a week later. Aha! Now, it’s possible in Outlook to set that a...

Following on somewhat from my off-topic Walking in the Country post, I thought I'd recount one useful tip that helps in grabbing the maps (or any other screen content, for that matter . at least anything that isn't rights-protected). If you have OneNote installed, press WindowsKey+S to initiate a snapshot...

I know it's been a bit quiet in recent weeks here, but I figured I could chip in the now traditional New Year random post, which might of interest outside of the working day. Here's last year's post on how to wash you car . During the Christmas and New Year holidays, I've been doing a bit of walking...

Following the price cut on the desperately-in-need-of-renaming BPOS services recently, I’ve been talking with a few people about the where the tipping point might be for running Exchange in house vs using some form of hosted provision. There are plenty of reasons why a hosted offering makes sense...

The snappily-titled Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) offering, announced some price cuts the other day… I heard from someone internally that the price cuts were driven by increased economy of scale – ie. as more customers signed up for BPOS, the cost per customer of providing the...

I noticed that the Sharepoint case study for Ferrari today, posted at the end of July – link here . The case study includes a cool video hosted in a nice Silverlight player – looks really slick and well worth a look, especially if you’re one of the Tifosi or just like Ferrari road cars. On a related...

This site has had something of a quiet launch – I first saw it a couple of weeks ago and was really impressed – it’s called Pinpoint and is a new take on the question, “How do I find a good Microsoft partner?” Simply enter a search (a name of a known partner, or any element of the technology or solution...