Clipboard Managers

I do a lot of copying and pasting. A lot. One of the things that often happens is that I copy a piece of information, paste it, copy something else, paste it, then need to go back to that previous information I copied. Or maybe I need to copy two (or more) pieces of information from one source before switching to the other source. The best way to handle this is with a clipboard manager. These tools allow you to keep a history of everything you have copied (up to a limit) and the refer back to them. Here are a couple that I have used in my job:

ClipMenu for MacOX (Updated 12/06/18 with new link)

Ditto for Windows

Date Arithmetic

I am working this weekend on a major data migration. I have several millions records to manipulate, store, and index. I needed a way to calculate how long the process was going to take. Once I had it in hours, I still needed an easy way to figure out the end time. Instead of trying to do the math in my head, I figured there had to be a site that would calculate that for me. Sure enough there is and it's nicely done. Here's a link: http://www.timeanddate.com/date/timeadd.html.

Quickly Filing Email in Outlook

I used to keep a ton of folders in Outlook. Any time I would file away an email, I would have to decide which folder it went in, scroll to that folder, and drop it in. But what if it belonged to more than one folder?

I finally found a great solution in Taglocity. Now whenever I get an email, I just hit Ctrl-T, tag it with one more tags, then file it into a folder called "Archive". Then if I need to find something, I just go to my Archive folder and filter by one or more tags.

By the way, I am not being paid to endorse any of these products (although I wish I were.) When I found a time-saving utility or process, I just like to share it with others.

Fast Application Access on Windows XP

It used to be that anytime somebody saw my laptop screen at work, they would joke about the number of icons in my Quick Launch toolbar. I had 2 rows of icons followed by a row of shortcuts. Although it was organized (Office products, developer tools, Internet apps, graphics, etc.), it did seem a bit overwhelming. So after purchasing my first Mac recently, I decided to look for an equivalent app to the Finder feature of OS X.

I discovered this gem:

It sits just about my system tray and using various "Magic Words", I can start up any of those apps that I had bookmarked before. And with auto-complete goodness, it's rather fast. I have now eliminated my Quick Launch toolbar altogether.

Now supposedly having a lot of icons doesn't slow down your computer, but I have noticed an increase in performance since I got rid of the Quick Launch bar. I think having shortcuts to a bunch of networked drives was causing a performance hit.

Best of all it's a free app. They just ask you to shop Amazon using the provided link.