Small ideas on legal practice, research and technology

Archive for ‘Technology’

Waste Time More Efficiently With These Keyboard Shortcuts for Navigating Facebook

Would you like to more quickly navigate and jump between different Facebook pages?
Or, if you want to look at it from another angle, would you like to spend less time wasting time on Facebook?
Like many other applications and websites, there are some handy keyboard shortcuts that will let you more quickly jump around the various Facebook screens. Read on to learn them.
But, before we get into these actual shortcuts, some comments on the slightly different keys that are required in the various browsers. Most of Facebook’s keyboard shortcuts correspond with the numbers, starting with 1-5, which more …

Posted in: Technology

An Amazing Collection of Google Search Tips!

Today I came across (hat tip to my assistant Tim) an amazing post titled How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques on John Tedesco’s blog.

In that post, Tedesco relates the content from a presentation by Google research scientist Daniel Russell. This post has the most amazing collection of Google tips I have ever seen in one place.
Everyone that uses Google to search the web should take time to read and learn the tips and search techniques covered in this post. It covers all the basic syntax tricks, but also some more advanced searching techniques. …

Posted in: Technology

Use an Email Message as a Reminder for Small Tasks

Through the course of the day, you will find many smaller tasks coming to your attention. They can come from many sources – perhaps you all of a sudden remembered something you wanted or needed to do, and more often than not, someone else will ask you to do something.
You can’t suddenly drop what you are doing every time one of these tasks comes up – you would never get anything done. But you need to make sure you capture a reminder of these tasks so you can complete them.
Here is a simple way you can do this: …

Posted in: Technology

Use Google as a Dictionary to Look Up Word Definitions

Some of us will have fond memories of grabbing a traditional book dictionary to look up the definition of a word. In grade school we had a smaller dictionary with big print and the occasional picture. Somewhere in most of our homes you will be able to find a big dictionary with lots of pages of very small print and no pictures.
In all likelihood, our personal dictionaries are all gathering dust. Why? There is no longer a need to go and grab a dictionary of the shelf to look up the definition of a word. Simply go to Google …

Posted in: Technology

Updated Version of Great Social Media Guide for Lawyers Released

Last spring, Meritas’ Leadership Institute released a Social Media Guide for Lawyers. This helpful resource provided lawyers with an overview of the three main social media tools — LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter— and some tips on how to use them for networking and marketing purposes. The guide also include two sample law firm social media use policies – one strict and one permissive.
As you all know, technology changes almost as fast as the weather does, and to keep up, Meritas has just released an updated version of the guide: Social Media Guide for Lawyers v. 2.0. This great …

Posted in: Technology

Minimize That Darn Office Ribbon for More Room on Your Desktop

If you are using Office 2007 or 2010, The Ribbon is now a part of your life. Some of you will be happy about this – some of you won’t.
The Ribbon was introduced with Office 2007. It replaced the standard Office toolbars and menus with a very large toolbar filled with graphical representations of control elements or commands. Commands are organized in logical groups by functionality and are collected together under tabs. Each tab relates to a type of activity, such as writing or laying out a page.
There are good intentions behind the Ribbon – honest! It was …

Posted in: Technology

Amazing MS Outlook Tip: Sort Your Inbox by Multiple Columns

Most MS Outlook users know that you can sort your Inbox by a single column. A single left-click on any column head will sort all the messages in the Inbox by the contents of that column. For example, alphabetically by subject or chronologically by sent or received date.
Note as well that a second click on the same column will sort the messages again in reverse order to the initial sort.
Sorting your Inbox by a column can be helpful for locating a message or deleting old messages.
But you can do more – you can actually sort your Inbox …

Posted in: Technology

Is Facebook Secretly Sharing What You Are Reading and Watching?

During a recent phone call, my colleague Catherine Reach and I had a bit of a chuckle over a rather risqué and NSFW (not suitable for work) article that one of our mutual friends had apparently just read online. Think clothing-optional antics by a celebrity in a bedroom in Vegas. As it happened, a few minutes before our call, we had both seen a Facebook update telling us that our friend has just read this particular article.

The critical fact here is not what happened in Vegas, but rather that our friend likely had no idea that the articles he …

Posted in: Technology

How to Access Gmail When It’s Down

Many people experienced some degree of frustration today with the Gmail outage. The Internet is more reliable than it has ever been and most major service providers like Google very rarely suffer service outages. But when they do, it can be a great inconvenience, in both your personal and/or professional lives.

For that reason there are some lessons to be learned. If you store your data on the cloud, be prepared to operate when you can’t access the cloud or the particular service. What cloud services do you use and how long could you function with access to them? Consider …

Posted in: Technology

Change the Style of Your Gmail Inbox to Make Finding Messages Easier

We all need help on keeping up with our email. The Gmail styles feature could help you more quickly see the messages that are most important to you.

Gmail has several built-in configurations or “styles” that change how your Inbox sorts messages. In the Classic style – the default Inbox style – messages are ordered chronologically by the date they arrived (newest first). The other styles present messages in slightly different ways. These are the other styles and what they do:

  • Unread First – Unread mail stays at the top; everything else is at the bottom.
  • Starred First – Starred
Posted in: Technology