Jody Gilbert

This has been a dynamic year for IT pros and tech leaders — and the scope of the most popular 10 Things topics reflects it. Check out our annual list o’ lists.

Favorite posts this year included several IT career topics, along with Windows 7 speed tips, HTML5 tags, development project mistakes, and cross-platform tools.

TechRepublic published nearly 400 original downloads in 2010 — from cost calculators to cheat sheets to logs, templates, and PowerShell scripts. Here’s a rundown of some of the most popular items of the year.

A few simple tweaks can make Windows Explorer more compatible with your working style and save you time down the road.

Cool tricks, free tools, and Windows 7 features took top billing in TechRepublic’s downloads library this year. Here’s a look at the most popular 10 Things lists of 2009.

Word can be a little unruly sometimes, making inexplicable changes, inserting text you didn’t ask for, and hijacking your formatting. Here are some common stunts that Word tries to pull on unwary users, along with a cure for each one.

Creating a PowerPoint presentation means juggling a lot of pieces — moving, formatting, and editing objects such as AutoShapes, pictures, text boxes, and the slides themselves. It’s not always immediately apparent how to select one of these items or how to navigate within it. Here are a few indispensable keyboard shortcuts that will quickly become …

Word tables have a million handy uses, from organizing tabular data to building an attractive page layout. Unfortunately, they don’t always act in predictable ways, and users have to waste time puzzling over dialog box options and toolbar choices. The following list of pointers isn’t intended to provide any sort of in-depth look at how …

One of the tenets of online content production suggests that the way you present information is as important as the quality of the information itself. This applies to how it looks (legible fonts, nice use of white space, nothing overshadowed by ads or graphics) as well as how it’s packaged–its form factor, as we like …

Balancing columns in a document is not a monumental task, yet there’s a trick to it that few users are aware of. If you find yourself supporting Word users (or simply want to fine-tune your own skills), this is a good technique to know. Learn (and share) the answer to this How do I…? riddle with the help of this graphical walk-through.

Sometimes all you want from a table is a bare-bones grid. But when a document calls for a little more polish and design appeal, put these tricks to work and turn those grids into sharp-looking tables.

I came across a productivity tip the other day, which–on the face of it–sounds entirely reasonable. The suggestion is that instead of getting sidetracked all day long by the arrival of one e-mail message after another, you configure your mail client so that it delivers mail on a restricted schedule. Like every hour or two. …