Did you know that in Microsoft Outlook you can set yourself a reminder to reply to an email? This is particularly useful for those times when you’ve checked your email but you know you don’t have immediate time to respond to someone — just set yourself a reminder to do it later and Outlook will prompt you when that time comes.

Setting reminders is really easy.

First, right-click on the email you want to be reminded to respond to later. In the menu that pops up, hover over Follow Up and then click on Add Reminder:

When you do that, a dialogue box will pop up asking you to set a date and time for the reminder.

Once you’ve set a suitable date and time, click OK and you’re done. When the time you’ve chosen rolls around Outlook will prompt you to follow up the email.

Pretty handy eh?

A recent study has shown that nearly one-third of small to medium sized business have adopted cloud computing services as part of their overall IT infrastructure, with another 35% planning to use cloud services sometime within the next year. 92% of SMBs using cloud services consider their overall experience positive.

Read more about the study and results here.

McDonaldsIT highly recommend cloud services to any small to medium size business wanting to make significant savings on their overall IT costs and boost efficiency. Contact us today to learn more.

If you’re using Google to power your email, there is a very handy feature available from right inside your inbox called ‘Tasks’. You can find it in the menu on the left-hand side of the screen when logged into your Gmail inbox.

Click on “Tasks” and a box will pop up on your screen where you can add, delete and edit tasks to create your own to-do list. Here’s an example:

When you’ve completed a task you can click the check-box next to it to “tick it off”, as I’ve done with item number 3 on my list. This will allow you to easily keep track of what you’ve done and what you have yet to do.

Clicking on the “Actions” button at the bottom will open a menu full of various actions you can take to organise your list:

I make use of this handy little feature all the time for my daily tasks. It’s a great reminder and because I spend so much time in my Gmail inbox, the task list is available to me frequently.

If at any time the list is getting in your way, you can easily minimize it by clicking the minimize button at the top-right corner of the list window (highlighted here in grey):

Easy! So now you have no excuse to forget to do things.

Recently we have had a couple of clients having problems with Microsoft Office on their machines, so I thought I’d put this helpful tip up.

Sometimes, out of the blue, applications can stop functioning correctly. There are a number of things that can cause this to happen, however sometimes it’s just not immediately obvious what the problem is and what caused it to come about.

One of the first things you can do to troubleshoot is to run a ‘repair’ on your MS Office installation. This method will not fix all problems, but it should fix most and it’s a really great place to start.

To do this, go to your Control Panel.

Click on “Uninstall a Program” (you may need to switch to Category view to see this.)

From the list, select your MS Office installation (you may need to scroll down to see it) and then click Change.

In the window that comes up, select Repair and then click Continue. After this the wizard will work on finding errors in your Office installation and fix them. This can take a few minutes, so go grab a cup of coffee and a piece of chocolate.

As I mentioned above, this should fix most errors but if there is a more serious issue it will require further troubleshooting. Contact McDonaldsIT for help with technical support and maintenance.

If you’re already making use of Google Docs in your business or home life, fantastic! You’re well on your way to better efficiency and productivity.

Here’s another way you can work quicker in Google Docs – with keyboard shortcuts for spreadsheets.

Keyboard shortcuts can save you loads of time by just pressing a few keys rather than clicking and scrolling through menus to find the features you want.

Click here for the extensive list of Google spreadsheets keyboard shortcuts.