Work Smarter

Work Smarter: Productivity and Automation

Don't work hard, work smart! Why spend hours doing things that could be done in seconds? This workshop will show you a range of amazing productivity ideas and ways to automate common tasks so that you spend less time doing repetitive work and more time on the things that really matter. Putting these ideas to work will save you hours of time!

Basic Computer Use techniques

2 finger Trackpad technique
Two finger scrolling
Two finger right click

Teachers, please learn these basic skills and explicitly teach them to your students!

Tab Management in Chrome

Moving tabs
Separating and Joining tabs
Pinning tabs
Duplicating tabs
Reopen closed tab

Keyboard Shortcuts

Expand this section to see a list of really useful keyboard shortcuts. Yeah, I know you don’t like keyboard shortcuts because you can’t remember them. Learn them anyway, you’ll thank me later.

Common Shortcuts

Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V - Cut, Copy Paste

Ctrl-B, Ctrl-I, Ctrl-U - Bold, Italic, Underline

Ctrl-Z - Undo the last action

Ctrl-F - Find on this page

Ctrl-K - Insert a link

Ctrl-T - Open new tab

Ctrl-Shift-T - ReOpen Closed tab

Ctrl-N - Open new window

Shift-Ctrl-N - Open new Incognito Window

Ctrl-W - Close this window

Ctrl-P - Print this page

Spacebar and Shift-Spacebar - Scroll up and down a webpage

Ctrl-Shift-> and Ctrl-Shift-< - Bump font size up or down (in Docs)

Want to be more productive?

Text Blaze (Chrome, Chromebooks), TextExpander (Mac and Windows)
Clipboard History 2 (Chrome), Flycut (Mac), ClipDiary (Windows)
Learn to use Styles - sample
Voice Typing

Pivot Tables and Filters

Working with data in a Google Sheet can powerful if you know a few tricks.

Filters - to sort or sift through large sets of data (sample)
Filter Views - to create saved views (without impacting on others)
Pivot Tables... Plot one variable against another. Immediately, Automatically. (sample)

Automating common processes with AddOns

AddOns increase the productivity of your Google drive tools by giving you extra features that are not standard. By taking advantage of these AddOns you can greatly increase your productivity.

Save As Doc - sample
QR Generator - sample
RowCall - sample
Yet Another Mail Merge - sampleForm, sampleSheet
Autocrat - sampleForm, sampleOtherStuff

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