If you haven’t switched over to Microsoft Windows 10, what are you waiting for!? This operating system is the whole deal from security to productivity apps to your own personal assistant.

Let’s talk about what’s new in the past few months....

Of course, there are tons of tools out there to take a screenshot, but very few to annotate them. Snip & Sketch is built into Windows that lets you annotate screenshots besides taking them. You can color code, highlight, write, or even use a protractor for drawing a circle or semicircle on a screenshot.

By now, you may have heard of Snap Assist on Windows 10. This happens when you drag a window too close to the top edge of the screen, and now it's maximized! If you wish to turn it off, you can go to your system, settings and search for multitasking.

If you do a lot of presenting from your computer, you can create a guest mode for Edge. Create the shortcut for Edge on your desktop, then right-click and go to Properties. In the Shortcut tab, Target: addguest to the end. Now when you launch Edge from your Desktop shortcut, you'll be using a clean browser (rather than the one with all of your browsing history or personal bookmarks).

Let's talk Classic with Window Labels. Remember the good ol' days when things had words as a label rather than some icon and you are just supposed to know what it represents? If you miss those days, you can easily bring them back! Well, at least for open windows in Windows 10. Go to your Settings, and go to the Taskbar section. Under the section, Combine taskbar buttons, select Never. Instantly, you'll notice a familiar screen if you used Windows 95!

OneDrive—a favorite! Microsoft has continued to make progress to offer us an easy backup solution. Now, we can save our files on our pc and backup to the cloud. OneDrive is here to backup your computer's Desktop, Documents and Picture folders automatically for you. If you have other folders, such as Music and Videos you can back them up to OneDrive too. If you go to the Search and type in OneDrive, that will open up your Microsoft OneDrive properties. On the Back up tab, click the Manage back up button. That allows you to customize what you want backed up to the cloud. ALWAYS remember to do a third party back up too. Should a hacker assume your Microsoft credentials, you’re going to need an alternative back up!

Magnifier read text aloud — Magnifer is a handy tool when it comes to zooming in or out of your screen, but did you know that it can also read to you too!? To use it, turn on Mangifier by pressing the Windows logo key and the + sign, then select Read from here. Magnifier will start to read to you from where your mouse pointer is in the document.

On the horizon….

How do you feel about a new virtual Windows 10 service? With many organizations moving toward cloud-based apps and services, it is currently scheduled for mid-July this year.

Cloud PC could help businesses cut hardware costs and reduce support overhead by eliminating the need for a full-blown on premises Windows PC for every employee. The cloud based version of Windows 10 also would include the latest features, fixes, and updates.

This service is still in testing mode, so we’ll see once we get to the heat of the summer what Microsoft delivers!

Katie Kremer is a Training and Project Specialist for Office 365, Security Awareness and Nextiva Phone Trainings. Katie has over 15 years of experience in the IT field and a degree in Business Information Systems.