IT Tip of the Month

Simple monthly computer tips and tricks to make you a computer wizard!

December 2024

Made it through a year of tips! 🥳

• 📲 Increase Your Service Level with QR Codes
  • Adding QR Codes to your brochures and signage is an easy way to increase your service level at no cost.
• 🔗 WunderMap
  • A weather map that includes data from official sources like Environment Canada, alongside data from local hobbyists, because maybe the weather at Jim’s house is closer for you than the weather at the airport.
• 🎅 Why did Santa’s computer get a virus?
  • Because he kept clicking on the naughty list!

November 2024

Have a second look at some of those applications on your computer you haven’t looked at recently.

• 🔗 Introducing OneNote
  • OneNote has been included alongside Word and Excel in Office for years now, but what does it do? Find out more about this note-taking application, and if it would help you organize your research, meeting notes, or your next big project.
• 🎨 Have you looked at Paint lately?
  • If you’re running Windows 11 and haven’t looked at Paint, Window’s built-in picture editor, for a while, it’s really changed. There’s layers. There’s quick shapes. There’s even AI image creation. One new feature that’s quite interesting is it’s ability to quickly remove backgrounds from photographs.
• 🧮 Have you looked at Calculator lately?
  • The Calculator built into Windows 11 does more than just add and subtract. It now has a “Date calculation” mode to calculate the difference between two dates. It can do graphing. It has convertors for volume, weight, temperature, and more. It even has real-time currency conversions using current rates.
• ✒️ Have you had a look at your Outlook signature lately?
  • Formatting and accessibility options for email signatures have changed over time. Does your email signature follow the current corporate guidelines? Do included images, like corporate logos and social media logos include alternative text for assistive technologies?
• 🤣 I fired up my old Windows 95 machine the other day and tried to use Microsoft Word.
  • By the time the program finally loaded, I had already written the entire report out by hand and mailed it to my boss!

October 2024

• 🔗 Use mail merge for bulk email, letters, labels, and envelopes
  • Instructions on how to personalize Word documents and Outlook emails using a template and a contact list.
• 🔗 Microsoft To Do
  • Built into Microsoft’s 365 environment, simple to do lists. Useful for simple task lists. Shareable with others to manage projects together. Available through your browser, or via an app.
  • Kevin Stratvert has a great video to help you get started with Microsoft To Do.
• 📖 Open by design: How open source can drive sustainable urban development
  • If you’re not familiar with the concept of open-source software and how cities can benefit from it, the United Nations Development Programme has a great primer for you. The City of Sault Ste. Marie is highlighted in a case study on page 48. 🎉

September 2024

• 🐝 Bee Cyber Safe!
  • A collection of bee-related puns about cyber security from the IT department’s award winning door. For the faster readers, click the pun to move to the next one quicker. (If you’d prefer something less “educational”, you could search for the queen bee instead.)
• ⌨️ Can’t find some keywords on a large webpage?
  • In your web browser, press Ctrl + F on your keyboard to search within the page.
• 🔗 Pixabay
  • Millions of high quality, royalty free images that can be used in your promotion materials for free without restrictions.

August 2024

• 🆘 Writing Good Helpdesk Tickets
  • Get the right help faster from IT by starting interactions with a good ticket.
• 🌩️ Be “Cloud Fail” Resilient
  • Don’t let an application outage result in a full department outage!

July 2024

• 🔑 Maintain Access to Your Online Accounts
  • Don’t let a computer crash prevent you from accessing your online accounts.
• 🔗 Create and add an email signature in Outlook
  • Includes instructions for New Outlook, Classic Outlook, and Outlook on the web.

June 2024

• 🦻 PDFs and Screen Readers Accessibility Demo
  • Materials from May’s PDF - screen reader accessibility demonstrations. Includes examples, instructions on how to use them, and instructions on how to fix them!

May 2024

• 📌 Pin to Taskbar in Windows 11
• 🔗 How to Clear Cache for All Major Browsers
  • With more and more applications moving to the web browser, many problems experienced after significant application updates can be fixed by simply clearing your browser cache.
• 🔗 Clipchamp
  • A free, easy to use video editor for doing simple video edits.

April 2024

• 🛑 Stop Printing and Scanning to Create PDFs
• 🔗 FreePDF.net
  • A web version of several PDF tools available in the PDFill PDF Tools Windows application.
• 🔗 PAVE - PDF Accessibility Validation Engine
  • A web application that identifies issues with PDF documents and helps fix them!

March 2024

• 🗣️ Read Out Loud in Adobe Acrobat Reader
• 📝 Writing Good Alternative Text
• 🔗 Improve Accessibility with the Accessibility Checker
  • Built into Microsoft Office, a tool to check for accessibility issues in your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
• 🔗 Who Can Use
  • Simulates how the foreground and background colour choices in your documents and publications are perceived by readers with visual impairments like colour blindness.

February 2024

• 🖼️ Image Types
• 😱 The Dangers of Improper Redactions
• ⬇️ paint.net
  • A powerful, free photo editor. Windows only!
• 🔗 apps.diagrams.net
  • An easy-to-use flowchart and diagramming tool, right in your web browser.

January 2024

👶 Our first month of tips!

• 💡 Bringing a Table on the Web into Excel
• ⌨️ Keyboard Shortcuts in Windows
• 🧹 Annual Digital Cleanup
• 🔗 DinoPass
  • A website that generates easy to remember passwords.
• 🤪 Yesterday’s storm was so cold, my computer froze.
  • It was my own fault though. I had too many windows open.

More Resources

• IT Workshops - Past workshop resources led by the IT department.

About this Project

Working in IT, questions come across our desks every day. Some of those questions may seem trivial to someone with a bit of savvy in the subject matter, but the simple answers can sometimes drastically change how the person asking does their work and solves their problems.

Rather than just sending then discarding those mini how-tos, this project shares them with the hope to empower users with the answers to the questions they may think are too silly to ask.

Have an Idea for a Tip?

Great!

Send in an email, or create an issue on the issue tracker.