Today I hosted a brown bag lunch with researchers from BI’s Technology Strategy group and MIT CISR. The objective was to get to know each other, but every meeting needs a topic, so I asked people to bring their computers and share a few smart things, useful web sites and other things they have discovered, that people wouldn’t know about.

Here is a list of some of the smart tricks and tools people came up with:

• If you need to edit a large document in Word, create a table of contents, place it at the beginning of the document – and jump to the right chapter or subsection by control-clicking on the TOC. (Alternatively, use the document map feature, see this blog post.)
• Pressing . (period) while in presentation mode in Powerpoint will give you a black screen, pressing the same key again gives you the slide back. Useful for making people listen to you rather than read the slide.
• A tablet computer is useful for presentations: Draw on slides, use Windows Journal to sketch out diagrams and drawings – which you can then PDF and make available to students.
• This article explains how to get rid of New York Times cookies with a bookmarklet.
• Google Reader (since discontinued, use Newsblur instead) lets you read RSS feeds quickly and easily.
• Clearly from Evernote is a great tool for reading webpages – removes unnecessary clutter and lets you save the page to Evernote.
• Think-Cell is a great tool for creating charts in Powerpoint, faster and simpler and more good-looking than standard Excel.
• Whenisgood.net is great for finding possible meeting times.
• The Meeting Planner from timeanddate.com is useful.
• If this then that lets you automate certain web tasks by monitoring information streams and taking action based on their results.
• Hipmunk is great for finding flights quickly, has a great graphical display.
• In Word, under the File/Open or File/Recent menu choice, there are little pushpin symbols that, if pushed, will make sure the document stays visible in the list.
  Very useful for keeping the position of frequently used documents that are stored in SharePoint without having to go through a lengthy access procedure.

The fun thing with a little meeting like this is that everyone comes away with at least one or two things they hadn’t thought about – which is more than you can say for most meetings.