productivity

Windows ships with capable, polished defaults — but for many real workflows the built‑in apps are the bottleneck: limited features, conservative design choices, and occasional performance problems leave gaps that small, focused third‑party tools fill quickly and cheaply. The six alternatives...

Windows ships with a tidy set of built‑in utilities that make a PC usable out of the box — but if you’re looking for speed, control, and features that actually match real workflows, the defaults often fall short and quietly slow you down. A recent roundup arguing that Windows’ bundled apps can...

Microsoft’s Copilot can now pull text out of a Word document and drop it into PowerPoint as a ready-to-edit slide — a small-seeming change with outsized implications for productivity, licensing, and IT planning, especially for organizations still on Windows 10 and watching Microsoft’s support...

Microsoft’s latest Canary‑channel experiment pushes intelligence deeper into the Windows shell: a new AI actions submenu in File Explorer lets you right‑click images to run Bing Visual Search, blur or remove backgrounds, and erase objects — all without opening a full editor. This context‑aware...

Satya Nadella’s short thread on X showing five ChatGPT-5 prompts has done more than spark social-media conversation — it offers a practical blueprint for how Microsoft expects Copilot to reshape executive workflows, compress decision cycles, and push generative AI from “drafting tool” to a...

Microsoft has quietly added a practical new trick to Copilot in PowerPoint — it can now generate a ready-to-edit slide directly from a Word document (or create a full presentation from a Word file), and that feature arrives at the exact moment organizations must face the hard deadline for...

The fan-made Windows 12.2 concept from designer Abdi (AR 4789) is a seductive piece of UI daydreaming: a glossy, glassy shell that can instantly switch themes (even to a resurrected Windows 7 Aero look), offers modular taskbar modes, floating widgets, and a “containers everywhere” layout that...

Microsoft has shipped Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27938 to the Canary Channel, and the headline feature worth immediate attention is the introduction of AI actions in File Explorer — a right‑click context menu that brings image editing, web visual search, and document summarization into the...

ZDNET’s compact roundup of “40+ Windows keyboard shortcuts” distills decades of built‑in OS commands and newer Windows 11 features into a practical, learnable playbook for anyone who wants to stop hunting menus and start working at keyboard speed. The list emphasizes high‑impact, repeatable...

Microsoft’s Copilot has quietly crossed a threshold: it can now turn sections of a Word document into fully formed PowerPoint slides — not as a rough sketch, but as editable, presentation-ready slides that include layouts, speaker notes, and suggested imagery. This is a practical, day-to-day...

Microsoft’s Copilot is getting quietly practical: you can now turn a Word document into a ready-to-edit PowerPoint slide in seconds — and for anyone still running Windows 10 there’s a second, much louder message: upgrade planning is no longer optional. This dual moment — an incremental but...

Tiling window managers aren’t a Linux-only productivity secret anymore — Windows has a healthy, maturing ecosystem of tilers that can radically change how you work, and four projects stand out right now for stability, polish, or sheer ambition. Overview Tiling window managers automatically...

Microsoft has quietly extended Copilot from the browser into the Windows desktop, adding a set of Copilot file actions directly into OneDrive’s Windows surfaces so subscribers can locate, summarize, compare and interrogate files without opening Office or a web browser—a change that reshapes...

When I first started using the command line on Windows, the Command Prompt felt like a utility drawer: useful for a handful of quick tasks but cramped, inflexible, and increasingly outclassed by modern tooling — which is precisely why switching to Windows Terminal has become a practical...

Windows 11 Insiders can now insert an en dash (–) and an em dash (—) with two simple keyboard combos — Win + - for an en dash and Win + Shift + - for an em dash — a small, practical change that removes a long-standing friction point for writers, editors, and anyone who types punctuation...

File Pilot arrived as one of those rare Windows utilities that makes you rethink a core desktop habit — opening and navigating folders — and after testing a half-dozen modern alternatives and a couple of legacy power-user tools, it’s the one that kept my attention. A hands-on review that...

The Dell 14 Plus arrives not as a headline-stealer but as a steady, unimaginative workhorse: modestly priced, competent where it needs to be, and unapologetically conservative in every visible choice. For buyers whose priority is reliability over razzle-dazzle—IT fleets, students, knowledge...

Satya Nadella’s five short Copilot prompts are less a CEO flex and more a practical playbook for turning generative AI into repeatable executive work — from meeting readiness and project rollups to launch probabilities and time audits — and the implications for Windows and Microsoft 365 admins...

Microsoft is quietly turning Edge into a research assistant you can talk to: recent Canary builds are testing a multi‑tab summarization feature that lets Copilot read and synthesize content from several open tabs at once — a capability that shifts Copilot from a single‑page summarizer to a...

PowerToys quietly hides a few genuinely time-saving features behind its polished dashboard — tools for backing up your entire configuration, automatic diagnostic logs you can read yourself, and an easy plugin system that turns the launcher into a Swiss Army knife. These three capabilities alone...