If you routinely have a dozen or more favicons staring at you when you open your browser, you have a problem. Working with too many tabs makes it difficult to process information and puts a strain on your PC. Sooner or later your browser —and your productivity—will buckle.
Fortunately, if you’re a Chrome user, there are a number of extensions that can help you manage your tab usage. Here are a few of our favorites.
OneTab
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It’s easy to lose control of your inbox knowing Gmail’s powerful search can always bail you out. But it’s way more efficient to not let the clutter build up in the first place. One of the best ways to keep your inbox in line is to take advantage of Multiple Inboxes, an “experimental” feature that has been kicking around Gmail Labs for years. This add-on automatically sorts messages into designated sub-inboxes, or panes, based on rules you create. Here’s how to set it up.
1. Disable Gmail’s tab system
If you’re using Gmail’s automatic tab system, you’ll need to disable it for Multiple Inboxes to work. To do this, log in to your Gmail account, click the gear icon, and select Configure inbox. In the next window, uncheck the Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums options and click Save.
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Wildcards are used in computer programs, languages, search engines, and operating systems to simplify search criteria. It’s similar to how wildcards are used in Scrabble or Poker. For example, in Poker, when aces are wild, that means an ace can represent any card in the deck. The same is true for wildcards in programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Windows, and even Google. In a nutshell, wildcards search for everything * or specific things?; define ranges [ ]; create groups ( ); repeat @, { }; anchor < >; and make exceptions ! (also known as Boolean NOTs).
How to access wildcards
From the Home tab, go to Editing group, select Find > Advanced Find (or press Ctrl+H). The Find & Replace screen appears. Click the More button to open the window for additional options.
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A well-designed slide deck does more than just look professional. It can help bolster your confidence as a presenter and makes it easier to communicate your ideas. Google Slides has a number of ways to help you easily put together compelling presentations even if you’ve never taken a design course. Here are a few that are guaranteed to engage eyeballs.
Change an image shape with masking
A standard square or rectangular image can look boxy and suck all the life out of your slide. Rounding the image’s corners or transforming it into another shape altogether can make for a much more eye-catching presentation. You don’t need to export your image file to a complicated graphics editor to do this. You can modify it right in Google Slides with the masking tool.
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Collaboration is Google Drive’s killer feature, so it’s not surprising that several team-oriented tools have integrated Drive into their services. Plenty of their users are already using Drive to create documents and spreadsheets and store all their files. By connecting your Google account with one of these robust collaboration apps, you can easily add files to projects, link them to tasks, or share them with team members.
Trello
Trello is a popular web-based project-and-task-management tool. It lays out your projects as a series of lists. Each list item—called a “Card” in Trello parlance—can contain attachments, checklists, images, deadlines, and discussion notes. Cards can be dragged and dropped between lists.
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Data imported from other spreadsheets or databases is already separated into fields, using something called a field delimiter—a comma, tab, space, or custom character—to separate one field from another. These databases import easily into Excel and place all the fields in separate columns. If your company pays bills and/or banks online, these sites usually offer copies of the company’s records in electronic form. CSV (comma separated values) is the most common data exchange format and, if offered, the best one to use. But what happens when all the data imports into one cell?
Importing & parsing data
If you copy a block of data from a webpage, a word processing file, or other text file, then paste into Excel using the Paste > Special > Text command, all the data is dumped into a column of single cells. This means the records are copied into separate rows, but all of the fields are in one cell. What a mess! Now what?
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We love Gmail because of the many ways it allows us to optimize our email experience. One of our favorite ways is to visit Gmail Labs. As the name implies, it’s the playground where Google rolls out its experimental features. The successful ones, such as “Undo Send,” eventually become part of Gmail. But you don’t have to wait for Google to put its official stamp of approval on them; many are plenty useful in their beta state.
We peek in on the Labs from time to time, and we’ve found a few more that can make your inbox more productive right now. To enable any of them, click the gear icon in the top-left of the Gmail pane. Then go to Settings > Labs. Scroll down to the feature you want, select the Enable radio button, and click Save Changes.
Authentication icon for verified senders
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