Whether you're looking to boost your spreadsheet efficiency, elevate your data analysis capabilities, or improve your career prospects, learning new tricks in Microsoft Excel is sure to help you along the way. So, add these six Excel hacks to your toolkit today.
If you're new to Linux and switching from Windows to Linux, there are some mistakes you want to avoid. Avoiding common beginner mistakes in Linux will put you ahead of the other Linux newbies.
Having a second brain is awesome. I've been using Obsidian a lot lately for just that. I built a knowledge base without even touching the Obsidian editor. Instead, I use photos and the Obsidian web clipper plug-in to store information. But I've started expanding my process a bit and came up with a few more ways to keep building that knowledge base using different techniques.
I’ve been using Linux for many, many years now, but I still keep learning new things all the time. It seems like, no matter what task you’re running, there’s a faster way to do it. So I decided to start focusing on these speed gains to see just how fast my terminal life can be.
Microsoft's PowerToys suite of Windows utilities, which you can download from GitHub or install through the Microsoft Store, has earned a reputation as a tool designed for — and used exclusively by — Windows power users. But the reality is more nuanced.
The web looks very different from when I first started using it. Browsers have changed, websites have become more complex, and I've picked up countless keyboard shortcuts along the way. Most have come and gone from my daily routine, but there's one I still turn to pretty much every day: Ctrl+Shift+D.
I'm one of those people who presses Alt+Tab hundreds of times a day to bounce between the many windows I have open. The problem is that Windows' built-in switcher starts to get awkward when I have lots of windows open, and aside from choosing how many thumbnails to display, there's not much room for customization.
A Calc II volume of revolution problem is a decent stress test for any study app. It has several moving parts: setting up the integral, choosing the right method, sketching the region being rotated, and labeling each stage clearly enough that a student can follow the logic back to the original question. Type that problem into a general chatbot, and you tend to get a wall of text. Somewhere in the middle is the right answer, but the steps blur together, and there's nothing to look at.
Canva has shipped 100-plus Visual Suite upgrades in 2026. Here are the changes most likely to reduce tool-switching, rework, and workflow friction.
The post Canva Hits 100 Visual Suite Updates: What Matters for Teams appeared first on TechRepublic.
Canva has shipped 100-plus Visual Suite upgrades in 2026. Here are the changes most likely to reduce tool-switching, rework, and workflow friction.
The post Canva Hits 100 Visual Suite Updates: What Matters for Teams appeared first on TechRepublic.
The cd command, short for “change directory,” is one of the most fundamental commands on Linux. It’s how you navigate the Linux terminal — moving between different working directories. That said, cd is an old-school way to navigate the Linux file system, and several modern alternatives have emerged that make the process faster and easier. Here’s a modern cd replacement that can help you navigate your file system with less typing and less guesswork.
A popular project is to install Linux on an old PC. While it's useful for keeping an old machine from the recycler, Linux isn't magic. It's a result of how Linux is designed.
You may have been using Windows for years. You might love it, hate it, or just wonder if there's a real alternative. Here are the reasons to tell if you've outgrown Windows and should consider checking out Linux.
I always saw Android widgets as little information panels sitting on my home screen. What changed was noticing which apps I was opening purely to glance at something, then immediately closing. So, I started treating them as functional shortcuts rather than just a fancy UI thing, and they reduced my habit of launching the app in the first place.
If you walk into a big box store and look at Samsung tablets, you may be surprised to see that they almost feel more like picking up a Microsoft Surface than an iPad. Samsung has quietly made enough changes to Android that the latest Galaxy Tab slates don't look all that different from the Windows laptops across the aisle.
If you’ve tried to build a second brain — one place to store all your ideas and retrieve them when necessary — you probably already know that it’s easier said than done. I’ve made multiple attempts at building a second brain myself, but ultimately failed because of all the effort required to maintain it. What finally made it stick was Obsidian, its Daily Notes feature, and a handful of free community plugins.
Every morning, I open the same apps and then spend the next few minutes dragging, resizing, and rearranging them across my two monitors. By the afternoon, everything has shifted again. I was getting tired of rebuilding the same desktop layouts, so I went looking for a better way. Then I found an easy-to-use PowerToys tool: Workspaces.
Acer’s DualPlay Mini combines gaming controls with a physical keyboard, but can the 8-inch handheld replace a travel laptop for everyday work?
The post Acer DualPlay Mini: Can a Gaming Handheld Replace Your Laptop? appeared first on TechRepublic.
Acer’s DualPlay Mini combines gaming controls with a physical keyboard, but can the 8-inch handheld replace a travel laptop for everyday work?
The post Acer DualPlay Mini: Can a Gaming Handheld Replace Your Laptop? appeared first on TechRepublic.
Your first step toward becoming an AI Power User is to adopt a few hacks, most of which only take a minute to implement. My favorites are below. There’s a lot here, so you can pick and choose. Or you can embrace my meta-hack: I told Claude to help me deploy all of them.
Let’s dig in.
Let AI interview you. Write a short prompt, then ask to be interrogated about tradeoffs, edge cases, and scope. The interview will surface requirements you might miss.
“I need to redesign our onboarding. Before you do anything, interview me: ask about constraints, edge cases, and what I’m assuming that I shouldn’t be. Keep going until you have what you need, then write the spec.”
Describe the outcome, not the steps. Say what should exist when it’s done, who will read it, and what it’s for; let the AI figure out ‘how’ — that’s its job.
Make AI plan first, then edit the plan. Fixing a plan costs you a paragraph; fixing a finished deliverable costs you the whole run.
Give AI a way to grade itself. Hand it a rule or a checklist that returns a pass or a fail. Then it keeps working until it passes, instead of stopping at the first thing that looks done.
“Here’s the checklist this memo has to pass: every number traceable to the source file, no claim without a citation, under two pages.”
Demand citations, then check each one. Require a citation for every claim and tell it to flag what it couldn’t verify instead of filling the gap. Then carefully review every single one, because a fabricated citation looks exactly like a real one.
Test it on something you already know the answer to. Before you trust it on work you can’t check, give it a task you can grade. That’s how you learn where it’s strong and where it’s bluffing.
Ask for options, then make it argue against itself. One answer reads as authoritative whether or not it’s right. Three answers and a rebuttal give you something to judge.
“Give me three ways to structure the launch. Then critique each one.”
Steer while AI is running. Redirect the job the moment you see it’s misunderstood you, instead of waiting to reject the finished product.
Run long jobs in parallel. Start the 10-minute research task and go get coffee or start a second job and alternate between the two. Either way the results are waiting for you instead of you waiting for the results.
Calibrate the effort to the task. Keep quick lookups in a simple chat (Google is the fastest), or using a lighter-weight model. Running the most powerful agent on a question that Google can settle burns time and credits you’ll want later.
Notice what these hacks have in common: each one happens while you’re working. Change what you do inside the task, and the results improve. To level up your prompts, check out my earlier GeekWire column.
The next ten hacks are about your setup and standing rules; many people miss these gems because the payoff is delayed. You spend twenty minutes on a Tuesday configuring something, and the return shows up in small increments over the following months.
Give AI a persistent workspace. Keep the files, standing instructions and history for one body of work in one place.
Connect it to the tools you use. Calendar, drive, inbox. The setup takes ten minutes, and afterward it works from your real material instead of whatever you remember to paste.
Grant the narrowest access the job needs. A hostile instruction hidden in a web page or an email can be read as though you typed it, and it can only act through the tools you’ve already handed over. A research task with web access alone is a far smaller target than the same task holding your files and your inbox.
Put standing preferences in settings, not in prompts. If you retype “be concise, no bullet points, write like a person” at the top of every request, you’re doing work the settings page will do once.
Decide once what AI may never do on your behalf. Write down the two or three lines that matter: don’t send anything, and don’t delete files. Put them in your standing instructions instead of remembering them prompt by prompt.
Talk instead of typing. Turn dictation on once. You speak about 3x faster than you type, and because talking is cheap you’ll ramble out the background and caveats you’d never bother typing, which is usually the context that was missing.
Turn anything you do repeatedly into a skill. Save the instructions for a task you repeat, whether a house style, a review checklist or a report format, so you stop rebuilding it from memory.
Schedule recurring work, but only after the prompt is proven. Get the output right by hand first, because a mediocre prompt on a schedule is a mediocre output every week forever.
Set your rule at two failed corrections. A fresh session with a better opening prompt beats a long thread cluttered with everything that already didn’t work.
Let AI remember you, then read what it remembered. Memory makes it useful faster, and a wrong memory quietly degrades every answer after it, so audit the list once a quarter.
The models keep getting better, so some of these hacks will be obsolete before long. Here’s something that won’t change in the foreseeable future. AI generates more options than you can read. What it lacks is judgment: it can’t tell you which one is right. That call is yours. Sometimes the best move is to skip AI entirely.
Never fall asleep and let AI take the steering wheel.
Caveat promptor: let the prompter beware.
My lists are distilled from the guidance the labs publish themselves. The first two sources carry most of what is above; the rest are worth a look if a particular habit is one you want to go deeper on.
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