ICYMI: Google Challenges Microsoft's Productivity Tools (April 21, 2016)

Happy Thursday, everyone. Don't weep for the end of XBox 360 console production. Rejoice that the servers will stay online.

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The biggest story from yesterday:  Microsoft is absolutely serious about using machine intelligence to improve worker productivity within office apps -- and Google's serious about making sure Microsoft's not dominating the workplace productivity market. The Alphabet company announced today that its Google Inbox app now clusters all messages related to an event on your calendar, and it can clip and save URLs of articles you'll want to read later.

In addition, it also announced that its Keep service -- what some folks use as a light version of OneNote -- now has a browser extension for saving links, much like the browser extensions for OneNote and Evernote, and users can now tag their Keep notes.

The collation of information in an email inbox, and linking that collection to a calendar event, is similar to the machine learning Microsoft's been touting in the newest iterations of its office products, and it indicates that users can expect to see a raft of products that purport to streamline information-management tasks. Machine intelligence as a component of office productivity is shaping up to be a big deal. Stay tuned to see which suite of office tools helps workers make more of their efforts.

Also worth noting: Intel's doing some strategic "repositioning," moving more of its capital into the cloud computing and Internet of Things market and reducing its efforts in personal computers. The restructuring is expected to eliminate some 12,000 jobs, or 11% of its global workforce. It's a clear sign that the bigger names in the tech industry are already thinking of a "post-PC" computing landscape.

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The most useful news:

How to indent a table in Microsoft Word.

Set up your smartphone as a home security camera.

Check out the 13 Google-created extensions that make Chrome more interesting and useful.

Five ways to temporarily turn off Windows 10 updating.

Go to school with this how-to-print from Microsoft Office apps tutorial  that tackles everything from margin formatting to two-sided printing.

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And here's what we've been publishing:

Mobile - Windows 10 Insider Preview Build Tracker for 2016 — Now updated with information from Build 14327 for Mobile.

Control Your Home Using Your Microsoft Band — If you’re an iOS user who is also a Microsoft Band owner and have the Wink system installed in your home, a new app called, Band Buttons, will give you the ability to control certain functions of your home including lights, door locks, and garage doors.

Future Corrupted Windows Driver Installs Addressed in Redstone — It turns out this error today was indeed caused by a corrupt driver download in Windows Update and was likely related to the BSOD most users saw when they began the update process.

Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book Users Report Issues with April 2016 Firmware Updates — Over the last couple of days Microsoft has issued April 2016 firmware and driver updates to the top four devices in their Surface line of hardware - Surface 3, Surface Pro 3/4 and Surface Book.