FranklinCovey is a company well known for its series of day planners and classes. What you may not know is the company also offers online seminars called LiveClicks. Unlike most of their seminars that can be a day or longer, these webinars are compact and last a couple of hours. The class I took had a lengthy title of, “Time Management for Microsoft Outlook Increasing Your Productivity through the Effective Use of Outlook.”

For the most part, I like software updates and the new features they bring. The problem is when companies change the location of existing features. This was the case when a reader asked me, “where is the message options command in Outlook 2010?” It is now buried, but you can bring it and other commands to the forefront by using the Outlook Quick Access toolbar.

Have you ever encountered a great article online and wanted to send it to others? Although there are several ways to do this task, the results vary. Sometimes the page looks close to the original and other times, only the words are the same. This is why it helps to know several methods for emailing web pages.

Browser extensions are great add-ons when they work. But I ran into a problem where one of them continually crashed when I opened Google Chrome. Worse, because it didn’t load properly, I couldn’t uninstall the Chrome extension in the normal manner. Fortunately, there is another solution to this problem.

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.