How-To Geek

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.

Whether you’re using a Chromebook or you’re just interested in switching from installed desktop apps to browser-based ones, web-based software can replace many of the programs people use on their computers — and can often improve on them.

One of Evernote’s selling points is that all your notes, clippings, and other bits and bytes are stored both on the Evernote servers and your local device. If that’s not enough data security for you (and it shouldn’t be), read on as we show you how to properly backup your Evernote notebooks.

A laptop is a marvel of engineering. So much work goes into designing and manufacturing all the individual pieces of hardware before combining them with software that’s taken decades to build. After going through all this work, laptop manufacturers are paid to make their laptops slower and more frustrating to use.

Many commands in Word have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them, making it quicker to apply formatting, save the file, and perform other tasks on your documents. These keyboard shortcuts can be customized, and you can assign shortcuts to commands that do not currently have them.

So you want to buy a tablet — you have a choice between the iPad, Android tablets, and now Windows 8 or Windows RT tablets. Windows tablets are often the most expensive. Software availability is crucial when using a tablet.

Have you ever wished your Hypervisor could be installed at the push of a button, without the tedious searching for the install CD and answering the same boring installation questions? HTG explains how to PXE an automated installation of Citrix-Xen.

In this guide, we will show you how to backup your movie collection on to blank DVD and Blu-Ray discs, along with ripping the movie on to your computer if you prefer to keep a digital copy instead.

You may have noticed a new command-line environment in Windows since Windows 7 — PowerShell. PowerShell is a much more powerful command-line shell and scripting language than the Command Prompt is, giving Windows system administrators a useful command-line environment.

Microsoft recently rolled out two-factor authentication for Windows Live accounts, and here’s how to enable it.

There may be times when you want to create a new Excel worksheet based on an existing worksheet. You can easily copy an entire worksheet in Excel to a new worksheet in the same file or even to a new, separate workbook file.

Have you ever wished you could get the “Windows Recovery Console” running for that one maintenance procedure or program you want to use, without having to remember where you’ve forgotten the CD? HTG explains how to boot WinPE from PXE.

The new UEFI Secure Boot system in Windows 8 has caused more than its fair share of confusion, especially among dual booters. Read on as we clear up the misconceptions about dual booting with Windows 8 and Linux.

Many applications include a component that starts when you boot your computer, slows boot time, and continues to run in the background using system resources. Windows Vista and 7 included tools for managing startup applications, but they were located in obscure places (Defender and Msconfig).

This guide explains how to configure a Windows Server 2008 machine to push out a static Ubuntu image that can be picked up by diskless terminals, so that you can have any number of machines running a fully-functional instance of Ubuntu without having a hard drive, as long as they are capable of PXE booting.

When entering formulas in Excel, you may want to remind yourself, or someone else, what it was for in the future. Or you may want to add instructions to let users of your spreadsheet know what to do in certain cells.

PC cleaning apps are digital snake oil. The web is full of ads for applications that want to “clean your PC” and “make it feel like new.” Don’t pull out your credit card — these apps are terrible and you don’t need them.

Your computer has a speaker port (perhaps even multiple ones) and a headphone port. You can plug your headphones into both of them and tunes come out, so what’s the real difference between the two?

By default, Excel recalculates all the formulas in your worksheet automatically when you open your worksheet or change any entries, formulas, or names on which your formulas depend. If you worksheet is large, with many formulas, this can take several seconds or minutes.

ActiveX controls are Internet Explorer’s version of plug-ins. For example, Internet Explorer’s Flash player is an ActiveX control. Unfortunately, ActiveX controls have been a significant source of security problems.

Microsoft recently launched Office 2013 as well as Office 365, a subscription service. Office 365 will cost you $9.99 per month or $99 a year, while Office 2013 will cost you $219.99 for the Home and Business edition, which can only be used on one PC at a time.

Microsoft attempted to make typing appear smoother in Office 2013 by adding a typing animation feature. If you’re a slow typist, you probably won’t notice it. However, if you type upwards of 80+ words per minute, this feature can be distracting and annoying.

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.

Previous versions of Excel have had an option for viewing two spreadsheets side-by-side. However, Excel 2013 now makes it easier by allowing you to snap each spreadsheet (opened in separate windows) to each side of the screen.

Your office mate says the new device your company issued is a fob, and you say it’s a dongle. Before things come to fisticuffs in front of the water cooler, let’s investigate.