The People Pane appears beneath the Reading Pane in the main window (and in all item windows). It displays thumbnail images for each person associated with the selected item and allows you to quickly access the status updates, appointments, attachments, emails, and activities for that person. It does take up a large amount of screen real estate, so your preference may be to minimize or completely disable this functionality.
Circumstances may arise that require you to convert your presentation to video for posting to the web, viewing on portable devices such as the Zune, or making it so that the user doesn’t need PowerPoint to watch the presentation.
OneNote runs several operations in the background such as indexing, notebook syncing and handwriting recognition. These can place an unnecessary drain on your battery if you don’t need these constantly running. By modifying the default setting, you can improve battery life and conserve some of that power for other tasks.
By default, Office 2010 places the OneNote icon in the notification area by your clock. If you don’t use OneNote very often, or just prefer to not have it taking up unnecessary space on your notifications area, you can remove it by following these steps.
If you are a Firefox user and Google Reader is your RSS feed reader, you normally have to take an extra step of choosing how you want the feed displayed, either on your Google homepage or in Google Reader. By making a couple of simple changes in the about:config settings, you can click on an RSS feed and preview it directly in Google Reader, one step away from subscribing to the feed.
An easy way to make your documents available from other computers or to even share with other users, is to save your document to your Windows Live SkyDrive account. Office 2010 allows you to save Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents directly to your SkyDrive account instead of having to upload it later.
Outlook prevents the automatic download of pictures in email messages as a security measure to help prevent possible spamming. It permits images from sites in your Trusted Zone to show but blocks all others. You can override this feature by following this tech recipe:
By default, Windows Live Mail places all downloaded items (email messages, calendars, etc.) in the Application Data folder in the current user’s folder. If you want to put this in an easier place to remember (like your Documents folder) or on a larger drive, you can do so by following these steps.
