This week we got lost in YouTube, as we all often tend to do, and found ourselves watching a TED Talk which explained 10 tech-related tips to save yourself time.
We already knew a few of these tips, but there were some that we didn’t, so we thought we’d share them on our blog.
Without further ado, here are 10 top time-saving tech tips:
1. When you’re on a webpage and you want to scroll down the page, don’t pick up your mouse and use the scroll bar. Instead, hit the space bar, which will take you down the page. Then, if you want to go back up, hit Shift+Space instead.
2. When filling out an online form, such as one which requires your name, address, date of birth etc. don’t use the mouse to click inside each box before filling it in. Instead, select the first box, and hit the Tab key every time you want to flick to the next box.
3. If you’re ever on a site but the text is too small to read, hold down the control key and tap the plus key. This will increase the size of the text every time you tap. Then if you want to make it smaller again, hold control and hit the minus key.
4. When typing on your iPhone or Blackberry, instead of switching layouts to access the punctuation to use a full stop at the end of a sentence, just double tap the Space bar. This will automatically add a full stop to the sentence, and capitalise the next word.
5. On all smartphones, if you want to redial the last person you called, all you have to do is hit the call button, and it will automatically add the last number you used. This saves having to go through your recent calls list.
6. Google is a dictionary – if you want to know the meaning of a word, just type “define” before the world, and google will tell you what it means.
7. Google is also a unit and currency converter. This means you can type a query such as “how many pounds in 472 kilograms”, and it will give you the answer.
8. If you want to copy and paste a word from a website, don’t try and drag your mouse across the word to select it. Instead, double click it, and it’ll select it for you. You can also double click and drag the mouse to highlight sentences in one word increments. You can even triple click to select an entire paragraph.
9. Shutter lag is the time it takes between you pushing the button on our camera, and your camera taking the photo. Cheaper cameras take time to calculate focus and exposure, meaning the perfect moment comes and goes before your camera decides to take a photo. To beat this, digital cameras let you pre-focus the camera by half pressing the shutter button. Then when you want to take a photo, fully press the shutter button and there’ll be no lag.
10. When giving a presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote, and you want to temporarily stop the slideshow or take the slide down without having to exit, press “B” to turn the screen black, or “W” for, you guessed it, white.
Simple, but effective. You can view the video online here.