If you have signed up for online accounts, newsletters, or even just to download a white paper that you want to read, you will know that a valid email address is usually required. As you are filling in the online sign-up form, a little voice inside your head may be telling you that you will be getting a whole new pile of daily notifications and junk mail cluttering up your inbox. Is there a way to deal with this? You bet.

If you have a Gmail account, Google allows you to create an infinite number of variations with your Gmail …

Many of us have sent angry or nasty comments in a Gmail email, only to regret it moments after hitting Send – or you remember that you didn’t attach the attachment you referenced in the email (hate with that happens!). If you have ever found yourself in either of these situations, rejoice, because Gmail’s Undo Send feature will help prevent them from happening again.
This handy feature delays the sending of your messages by 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds, thereby giving you a small window during which you can hit an “undo” button to prevent your message from going …

iPads and iPhones have a Shift key, which is handy when you need to type a capital letter. But what if you want to type something in all caps? Pressing Shift for each letter is a pain. No worries though, a simple double-tap on either Shift key will lock them down so you will get all caps as you type. Just tap either Shift key again to turn all caps off.…

When adding a picture or clipart to your PowerPoint or Word document, you may run into a situation where you don’t want its background to appear. This happens most frequently to me when I place a logo or symbol onto a PowerPoint slide and its background is a different colour than the background of the slide.
There is no need for a fancy photo editing tool like Photoshop. In Word, PowerPoint and Excel 2010 and later versions you can use the Background Removal tool to easily remove a background from a picture. (Older versions of Office may have the more …

On a PC it is easy to grab an image of what is on your computer screen (aka a “screenshot”), just hit the dedicated PrintScreen key on your keyboard (sometimes abbreviated as Print Scrn, Prnt Scrn, Prt Scn, Prt Scr, Prt Sc or Pr Sc). Doing this places an image of your screen into the Clipboard. Pressing the Alt key with PrintScreen will put an image of just the active Window into the Clipboard. You can then paste (as in cut or copy and paste) that image into a document just as you would anything that is stored in the …

By default, Microsoft Excel gives your worksheets the rather bland names Sheet1, Sheet2, Sheet3 and so on. These default names do nothing to help you remember what is in each worksheet, especially if you come back to work on a workbook many days, weeks or months later.

There are a number of helpful things you can do to tweak and change worksheet tabs in ways that will help you find and remember what you have in a workbook. They include:

• Giving the tab a new name that describes the contents: To do this, double-click on a tab; or right-click on

Most of us spend many hours a day browsing the Web. If you are reading an article, or scanning through a long page, it is a pain to reach for the mouse and use the scroll bars, and hitting the down cursor key will only move you one line at a time. Not very fast or efficient.

There is an easier way – pressing the spacebar once will jump you down one screen. This works in all PC and Mac browsers regardless of how big your font size is. Hitting the spacebar once will magically jump you to a full …

The Universal Serial Bus or USB cable has become the universal standard for charging and connecting electronic devices. USB cable connectors come in a variety of shapes and they can fit very snugly or offer very little resistance when you plug them in. Getting the right orientation can sometimes be a challenge, and forcing them in the wrong orientation will damage the connectors. Here is a little tip to help you get it right: look for the USB trident logo, it indicates which side of the connector should face up when you are plugging things in. …

We’ve all been there: Waiting for an urgent email, text or call while watching the red battery warning light flash as you are running from one place to another. Dimming the screen and closing open apps will keep your device alive a bit longer, but often it won’t be enough.
In this situation, you end up looking for a place to get a quick charge– but as you are in a rush, you don’t have a lot of time to let your device charge-up. Here are two options that will allow it to charge more quickly:

1. Close all open apps

Anyone who has spent a lot of time using Excel will occasionally make and error when entering data or a formula. Thankfully, Excel is programmed to tell you that you made a mistake, and it will even give you an error message that will suggest what the problem is. These are the error messages that Excel will give you, and an explanation of what they mean:

• ###### = value is too long to display (make the column wider to fix this)
• #VALUE = the wrong type of argument or operand has been used
• #DIV/0! = a formula divides by 0