productivity

The moment you finish the out-of-box setup on a fresh Windows PC, there’s a small toolkit I install before I ever open Edge: a compact set of free, focused utilities that close gaps in Windows’ defaults and get the machine productive fast. That checklist — highlighted recently in a How‑To‑Geek...

Insight Enterprises, working with Microsoft, HCLTech and a small integrator called Skewer, has rolled a major AI upgrade into the Cricket Australia Live App that promises on‑the‑fly, editorial‑style match insights, interactive follow‑up Q&A and access to official scorecards stretching back to...

Microsoft’s PowerPoint has just taken a practical leap toward making large, messy, multi-source slide decks manageable: Copilot can now reference up to five files when it builds a presentation, letting the AI pull structure, facts, and brand assets from multiple documents so you can produce a...

Windows 11 ships with a lot of good intentions—and a surprising amount of attention‑grabbing noise—and the fastest productivity win after a fresh install is to quiet the OS so it fades into the background and stops pulling you out of deep work. Background / Overview Windows 11 increasingly...

Windows 11 marks a clear evolution of Microsoft’s desktop vision: a cleaner, more consistent user interface, tighter device integration, and a set of productivity-first features built around modern hardware and security expectations that together aim to deliver the “ultimate PC experience.”...

Disney has quietly moved from caution to active deployment of artificial intelligence across its operations, rolling out an internal assistant called DisneyGPT, piloting employee access to mainstream AI tools and — in a separate but connected public move — committing major capital to an OpenAI...

Irish organisations are moving from emergency-era digital fixes to deliberate design: hybrid work is now an operational baseline, and the real conversation has shifted to how artificial intelligence can be woven into that hybrid fabric to raise productivity, protect data, and reshape jobs...

AAG IT’s Sheffield Business Insights Dinner — held a year ago at 118 Mowbray St, Neepsend — was more than a networking supper; it stitched together practical AI, cyber‑security and financial governance advice into a single, actionable evening for UK business leaders, and the lessons from that...

Microsoft’s internal Copilot usage study — an analysis of roughly 37.5 million anonymized conversations — and today’s avalanche of product announcements from Shopify and Adobe together make one thing unavoidable: conversational AI is no longer an experiment contained to code generation and...

Nancy University Hospital (CHRU de Nancy) has quietly turned a pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot into a strategic lever for workforce attraction and productivity — starting with a careful, role-focused trial and scaling rapidly after demonstrable wins in everyday tasks like email triage, document...

Chrome’s ubiquity on Android has long masked a simple truth: the preinstalled browser is convenient, not always best-in-class — and for many power users the mobile browsing experience can be markedly improved by alternatives that offer richer tab management, built‑in privacy tools, desktop‑grade...

Mastering a compact set of Windows keyboard shortcuts is one of the quickest, lowest‑cost productivity wins available to anyone who uses a PC every day — and a well‑curated cheat sheet that focuses on high‑ROI keystrokes will repay hours of time and mental energy over the course of weeks and...

Microsoft has quietly given the Run dialog — the tiny Win+R prompt that’s been part of Windows for three decades — its first substantial visual overhaul, replacing the stark Win32 modal with a roomier, Fluent‑style overlay in recent Windows 11 preview builds. Background For many power users and...

I cleared my Windows 11 desktop of every icon with a single right‑click—and it changed how I work for the rest of the afternoon. The small tweak is simple: right‑click any blank area on the desktop, choose View → uncheck Show desktop icons, and your entire icon grid disappears without deleting...

I installed Microsoft PowerToys on my main Windows 11 PC and three small utilities—FancyZones, Peek, and Advanced Paste—immediately removed a disproportionate amount of daily friction: custom window layouts that behaved how I wanted, a fast file preview without opening heavyweight apps, and...

Resizing a photo in Windows’ built‑in Photos app is a two‑click habit once you know where the controls live — and for many everyday tasks (email attachments, blog images, quick social posts) Photos now covers everything you need without installing extra software. This deep dive explains the...

I didn’t expect a built‑in screen reader to become one of my most productive shortcuts, but Windows 11’s Narrator quietly did — and it’s worth revisiting if you want to read less with your eyes and more with your ears while staying productive. Background / Overview Narrator ships with Windows...

Microsoft has begun rolling out chat-first Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, turning conversational prompts into near‑final documents and in‑app edits while expanding Agent Mode — a step Microsoft calls “vibe working” that pairs multi‑step, auditable AI workflows...

Microsoft has quietly tightened up OneNote’s search experience on Windows, moving the search results dropdown so it no longer obscures the page canvas for users who keep the page list on the right — a seemingly small tweak that materially improves readability, reduces visual clutter, and smooths...

Interact’s Autumn 2025 release brings a clear claim: turn the intranet from a passive repository into an active, agent-driven surface that listens, surfaces recognition, and answers questions inside employees’ workflows. The vendor’s headline features — a Microsoft 365 Copilot connector, two...