Kelly LaForest

Microsoft Office 365 blog by a OneNote MVP.

Latest Posts

10 Random Useful Online Tools

These don’t really fit into a specific category like images and graphics or building websites resources, but I find myself pulling them out of my back pocket once in a while to complete a random task: My Favourite *Random* Online Tools: Bing Converter – Digital Storage – Convert Units – KB to MB – Because sometimes …

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Six Free Useful Tools When Working with Websites

When working on websites, these are a few tools I like to keep in my toolkit: Internet Archive Wayback Machine – when you need a little time travel in your life. Website Crawler Tool and Google Sitemap Generator – free tool that crawls a website to produce summary list of internal and external links, errors, …

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Top Three Paid Online Image and Icon Collections

These are my top three website that I visit when I when I have a few dollars in the budget for a special project to spend, I want to find stunning, creative, royalty-free stock photos and sharp, clever icons.   Top Three Paid Options: Font Awesome Pro – The paid version has 1,700 professional vector icons that …

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Four Favourite Free Online Image and Icon Collections

These are my go-to four favourite online website that I visit when I am looking for an image, graphic, or icon to use when writing a blog posts or teaching a class: Four Fave Free Options: Pixabay – Over 1 million stock images that you can “copy, modify, distribute, and use the images, even for …

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Free Access to Thousands of Online Courses with GVPL Card

Did you know that you have access to thousands of top quality online courses for free with your Greater Victoria Public Library (GVPL) card? Public Library cardholders in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada have access to more than 3,500 courses and approximately 144,000 video tutorials on the an online learning platform, Lynda.com. All you need to do …

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Top Six Best Random Text Generators

I’m grateful Microsoft changed the random text up and we don’t have to stare at paragraphs of “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” anymore. I do like that the sample text that is inserted into a Word 2016 document when you type =rand() is informative, and offers tips on new features in Word 2016. However I’m starting …

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Checklist to Setup a Laptop – Top 12 Setup Tips

I received an amazing parting gift from itgroove to thank me for my four years of service  – they gave me my Surface Pro 3 device. (I know!) They kindly formatted the machine so I’d have a fresh start. Today, I powered on the device, and started with setting up my device to be a …

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How to Create a GIF using TechSmith Snagit 13 Editor

GIFs are the new emoticons. While most people thing of GIFs as funny memes that are often used to visually explain an emotion. Check out GIPHY to see what I’m talking about Willis. For example, here is a GIF that shows how I feel about Snagit… and kittens: GIFs are popping up everywhere – you can …

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Technology Troubleshooting 101

Thank science for the internet. Temporarily felt the pain of not being surrounded by a team of brilliant IT techs to jump to my aid and solve my technology challenges instantly… … after 10 minutes of clicking around with my blood pressure rising, and a half second of feeling that all is lost, I hit …

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Google Instant – Why It Mattered and Why It Doesn’t Anymore

My colleague posted this Gizmodo article in our Corporate Yammer Jibber Jabber group today: “RIP Google Instant Search, You Were Never Necessary” (Rhett Jones, 7/26/2017, Gizmodo). At first read through, I didn’t get it. So I opened Google in my browser and tried searching and everything looked the same. After finding some screenshots in another article …

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