One of Microsoft Outlook’s great features is the ability to customize views. Sadly, the software doesn’t make all your choices obvious. As example, a reader recently complained that Outlook doesn’t provide a task view that hides future tasks. Although there isn’t a default view that met his purpose, it was easy to create a custom task view. The trick is to know where to look in Outlook.

As the New Year comes in people are trying to keep resolutions. Two popular resolutions that impact your productivity relate to diet and exercise. Poor nutrition and minimal exercise affect your energy and performance levels. One fitness tool I started testing last month helps you in these areas. It’s called FitBit and it consists of a small hardware device and web interface. The fitness tracking service is more than a pedometer, but a system that records your sleep data, calories burned and food intake.

If you’ve not tried private browsing, this is the best time for you to learn. It’s a feature many new web browsers offer that can hide your web activity such as shopping at online retailers for gifts. It’s also useful when you’re on a public terminal.

Ever have one of those days where you’re trying to get out an important document, but you find the spellchecker in Word isn’t working? Sometimes you can’t check a specific document and other times you can’t spell-check any documents. Either way, you might try some of these suggested solutions.

Several years ago, I wrote a tutorial on how to customize Google News. It worked well until Google made some changes. Fortunately, an astute reader alerted me how my earlier steps no longer worked. The good news is I’ve reworked the instructions. As with most directions, there are multiple ways to create a custom news section on Google.

I don’t think I need to explain to faithful readers, I’m lazy. It’s not that I dislike work, just that I hate routine tasks. For example, there are websites I work with where it’s critical the correct page content shows. Every so often, someone makes a change that I didn’t know. It’s not that they’re keeping me out of the loop, just that they’ve moved on to their next task. I found a free intelligent agent that allows you to monitor web page changes.

Online forums and bulletin boards can be great places to find answers. The problem however is getting through all the information. Sometimes this is because users post a question or solution in the wrong topic. The other problem is many forums lack a search feature. There is a quick workaround if the forum doesn’t require a password to view the data. – Google’s Site: operator.