Unfortunately, not all emails in the workplace come with an unsubscribe link. Day after day, emails arrive in your inbox that are just a distraction. Some common examples include:
If you spend a lot of time typing the same answers to questions you get repeatedly, create Quick Parts to insert that text into email replies in just a few clicks. No need to keep typing the same thing over and over again or having to find an old response to copy and paste. When you’ve finished typing a response that you expect to need to send again, follow the steps below to save the text as a Quick Part:
This is a very quick and handy tip. Whenever you are searching for an in Spotlight, typing the initials of the app will bring the results faster than typing its whole name. For example, if I want to search for App Store, I will simply type the letters a and s. Once you make this a habit, you will perform faster app searches and save time a few keystrokes at a time.
Need to zoom in for specific details using iPhone? You no longer need to open the Camera app and use digital zoom. iOS 15 now comes with a new Magnifier app. As the name suggests, you can use it to zoom in on elements, text, use a bunch of filters, flashlight, play with the brightness slider, and more.
Spotlight Search also gets a major boost with new features. Spotlight uses intelligence to search photos by location, people, scenes, or objects. Using Live Text, Spotlight can also find text and handwriting in photos. Spotlight now offers web image search and all-new rich results for actors, musicians, TV shows, and movies. The good news is, you can access all these goodies right from the iPhone lock screen. Use the same swipe-down gesture from the lock screen, and Spotlight Search is ready to serve you.
If you’ve had success with the previous Outlook tips and are interested in getting into more advanced email management, it’s time to take a look at Quick Steps. Quick Steps allow you to automatically perform long strings of actions based on a trigger. Say at the end of the month you receive a series of invoices from vendors or contractors. Your normal process is to review the invoices, forward the invoices to your accountant, and create a reminder to follow up with the accountant a week later to make sure the invoices were paid. Quick Steps can take care of the last two steps for you with fewer clicks than if you performed the tasks manually:
Over the years Spotlight has evolved from being just a search mechanism for Mac. Now, you can use it to perform many functions. For example, you can use Spotlight for carrying out currency and unit conversions. I use it almost daily to convert measurements, currency, and more. You can also use Spotlight to perform simple mathematical calculations including multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, and more. Similarly, you can use Spotlight to get weather information of any city in the world. Type the word weather followed by the city name and it will give you the current weather condition. You can also find word definitions. Type the word and hit the “⌘+L” keyboard shortcut to pull up the definition of that word.
This is a fun one. If you love to use emojis, there’s an easy way to call the emoji keyboard on your mac. To do that, hit the keyboard combo Cmd+Ctrl+Space and the emoji keyboard will open. Here you can scroll down to find the emoji you want to use. You can also perform a search to find the one you want to.
macOS focuses on keeping the user interface clean and simple. And while it makes sense, sometimes it hinders usability. For example, one thing that irks me about macOS is that it doesn’t show the file path by default. So, if you search for a file in Spotlight and open its location, you will not be able to figure out how to reach that location. Thankfully, there’s a handy keyboard shortcut that can enable the file path. If you want to see a file’s location path, hit the “Cmd+Opt+P” keyboard shortcut and it will display the file path. If you forget this keyboard shortcut, you can find it using the “View” menu as shown in the picture below.
One of the most infuriating thing about performing search in a Finder window on Mac is that it initiates the search for the entire Mac. It makes no sense but that’s how it has been since ages. Thankfully, you can change this behavior in the Finder Preferences. So, open Finder Preference (⌘,) → Advanced and under “when performing a search” option click on the dropdown menu to select “Search the current folder”. It is going to save you a lot of grief in the future.