Copy and paste is one of the most-used functions in Microsoft Word. In Word 2010, though, there’s a function called the Spike that might be even more useful for moving text and pictures around a document.

The Spike is an extended clipboard feature of Word 2010. It allows you to remove two or more items from different parts of a document and reinsert them as a group in a new location in the document.

This can be very handy for editing large documents, piecing together research projects, arranging agendas, compiling reports and more.

Want a touch of Ice Cream Sandwich before the new Android OS is released?  You can now install the Ice Cream Sandwich keyboard on your Android device via a free download.

The unofficial version of the Android 4.0 keyboard, posted by AstronautMillionaire on Reddit, replicates the look and function of the new Android keyboard. The keyboard doesn’t look radically different from the current Android 2.3 keyboard, but it’s smart and it has some significant multi-touch, auto-correct, and prediction improvements.

To install the new Android Ice Cream Sandwich keyboard, simply download the APK and install it. Then activate the keyboard by going into ‘Language & keyboard’ settings in the Android Settings menu. The app’s options menu lets you tweak various options as well, such as auto-capitalization, vibrate on keypress, popup on keypress, and more.

To turn on the Android 4.0 keyboard, long-press in a text field and select ‘Ice Cream Sandwich keyboard’ in the ‘Input Method’ pop-up.

If you’re still not impressed with the Android keyboard, you can always install a third-party keyboard application for Android that make typing faster and easier. My personal favorites are SwiftKey X, Swype and SlideIT.

With the majority of your music stored on your computer nowadays, it's easy to see how your music library can quickly become a disorganized mess. Songs might not have the right title or artist information, or you might even have duplicates. How do you find the tracks you want, when you want to find them? That's where Muso comes in!

Muso is an organizational tool for your digital music collection. It's not a music player, nor is it a playlist manager. Instead, think of it as an alternative user interface to manage the music on your PC.

Start by importing your music into Muso. You can do this by either selecting individual folders or files on your hard drive or an actual music player's library. Muso currently supports iTunes, Winamp and Logitech Squeezebox devices, from which it can both import and play music. You can browse your music collection on Muso by complete albums or individual songs, as well as filter your music by artist, year and rating.

What makes Muso really stand out is its advanced tagging system, which lets users describe their songs and albums as they choose, including by mood. If you're interested in more than just sorting and browsing through your music collection, Muso also has detailed information about the artists, plus album art that's been downloaded from Last.fm, Wikipedia and Amazon.

Muso is offered free as a 30 day trial, after which users must pay purchase either an annual or unlimited license to continue using the software. If you're looking for a new way to keep track of all of the music in your library, Muso just might be the tool you've been searching for!

How do you organize your digital music collection? If you use a program, which one is it and how does it help you most?

If you're interested in making the most of your smartphone, you should really think about using it to manage your personal finances. It's with you all the time, you can record everything you spend, and you'll always know what's left in your account.

If you're looking for some great apps to get started on the path to financial solvency, read on - we've rounded up four of the best, and you're sure to find one to suit your style.

Back to school - it’s that time of the year again. Depending on your take, the thought of returning to the high school or college grind might either excite you or fill you with a sense of dread. Either way, you’re going to want to get organized. In fact, a lot of the stress associated with school relates to having to juggle a myriad of assignments and due dates.

The best way to get organized is to create a class schedule and keep up with deadlines for your assigned work. Keeping a paper planner and schedule is a bit archaic though, and takes up precious space in your backpack. Having an electronic copy is the way to go.

With that in mind, here are some great choices to help get your school year off to an organized start:

Get Organized: Created with students specifically in mind, this app allows you to fully organize your class schedule every semester or quarter. You can specify meeting times by hour and day, add the number of credits the course is for and even note what textbooks are required. If you’re a notorious misplacer of class syllabi, this is a great way to pre-record due dates and the professor’s contact information, including office hours. Get Organized also lets you color code your assignments by importance and due date. This incredibly useful app is also available for Mac and has a portable version for students on the go.

File sharing and collaborative tools are all the rage lately. From cloud-based Box.net to Microsoft SharePoint and beyond, being able to access your important documents immediately and from virtually anywhere is of utmost importance to users today.

Dropbox is arguably the best known cloud-based file sharing service. It’s available for Windows PCs, Macs, iPhones and Android smartphones. It’s Android that received this newest Dropbox update, and although it’s a small one, it should please Android users who value simplicity and ease of use.

Beyond vaguely described bug fixes, security updates and performance improvements, Dropbox for Android has added two new features that make using the app from your phone even easier. The first involves the ability to delete folders in your account directly from your phone. This will help users cut down on clutter wherever they go. The second update has added photo thumbnails to the file browser. This should help users quickly identify the files they’re searching for.

Making file uploads and organization both quicker and simpler seems to be Dropbox’s main points of focus and it’s hard to find anything to complain about when this newest update gives users just that.

Quicken 2007 won't work on Lion due to Apple's decision to drop Rosetta support. This is possibly the final blow for thousands of Mac users who were bitterly disappointed last year by the latest version of Quicken - Quicken Essentials - because of the decision to drop online features such as the ability to pay bills, store investment transaction history and export to TurboTax. If there were ever an example of a developer trying to their best to alienate Mac users and destroy their own product, it's definitely Quicken creators Intuit.

However, the good news is there's no reason to let Intuit or Quicken 2007 stop you from upgrading to Lion. Here is the only selection you'll ever need of the very best alternatives for Lion:

Moneydance

While Moneydance may not feel quite as intuitive as Quicken for Mac at first, it can do pretty much everything the latter can and was actually one of the first ever financial applications on the Mac so it's certainly not lacking in experience. Most importantly, unlike the majority of financial software for Macs, it supports extensive online banking and bill payment features. You can retrieve credit card statements and bank statements from most major US banks that support OFX standards. Even better, you can use Moneydance to automatically pay your bills for you too and if you're worried about all your Quicken data, Moneydance will import it all from Quicken Essentials.

There's no doubt that Microsoft Word is the best word processing program around. Like most luxury products, however, it comes with a hefty price tag. Even if you decide to get a Microsoft Word trial, you can't download the program individually - you must download the whole Microsoft Office suite, and it's a monster. Even once you manage to get the beast installed on your machine, you'll only be able to use it for 60 days before you need to pay up nearly $400!

So, what's to be done? Luckily, there are a bunch of great free Microsoft Word alternatives, each of them perfect for a different purpose. Keep reading, and we'll show you how to get all of the functionality without the tyranny of Word!

Just need to read a Word document?

If you just need to read a Word document, but not change or modify it in any way, then you have things really easy. Just download Microsoft Office Word Viewer, an official Microsoft product that does exactly what it promises - it lets you open and read Word documents, even if you don't have the program installed!

On the same day that Facebook announced it has added Skype video calling,  Skype for Mac has just been updated to version 5.2.0.1523 to finally include group screen sharing.

There have also been a few other improvements including improved multi-tasking, a sidebar enhancement, support for Mac's built-in HD and Logitech's B910 HD cameras and some minor bug fixes.

These tweaks and improvements still don't address the major gripes of many Mac users concerning the interface however and probably won't stop the exodus of people downgrading to the old version 2.8. Added to the recent takeover of Skype by Microsoft and the rise of Apple's Facetime (and now even Google+'s new Hangout feature), the Skype team are going to have to do much better than this to hold onto their Mac user base.

Download Skype for Mac 5.2.0.1523 here.

Firefox is a really flexible and customizable browser, but over the course of a day it can really start to eat up memory, and slow your PC down. Unfortunately there is no silver bullet for this problem, but here are four ways you can help keep Firefox's memory use in check:

Memory Restart: This little add-on simply lets you set a maximum memory threshold, and allows you to choose either to be warned when it is reached, or to automatically restart Firefox. Memory Restart is a simple solution, and a good way to keep down the memory usage that creeps up over your day.

Memory Fox: This add-on monitors Firefox's memory usage, and when activated it will cut it. This management of Firefox memory use seems to work in the short term, although we found that over time it would creep back up again. Like Memory Restart, it's not perfect, but does help.

Check your Add-Ons: Mozilla has a page that names and shames the add-ons that are the biggest memory hogs. Niamh wrote about it a while back, and suggested some alternatives to the worst offenders. Check out her post here. Disabling add-ons is a common suggested solution to keeping memory usage down, but as many people point out on Firefox support forums, Firefox without add-ons just isn't the same.

Take a deep breath: And change your browser. Both Chrome and Opera are improving their range of extensions. While they aren't as customizable as Firefox, they are more efficient and will lighten the load on your processor. The Firefox memory problem has certainly been noticed, so lets hope something is done about it by Firefox 6, due in September.

Microsoft's two biggest sources of revenue are Windows and Office. After several months of beta testing, the release of Office 365 therefore marks a significant change in the way Microsoft is attempting to do business. The company has been effectively forced into this situation by Google Docs which is completely free to use and offers a competitive alternative to buying Office. However, the one advantage Microsoft have is that not only is Office a more powerful and complete package than Google Docs, but millions of people and businesses trust it and use the desktop version of it everyday.

In theory then, Office 365 sounds like a win-win situation. For the first time, users no longer need Office installed on their computer - they can access the entire suite online for a small monthly fee with all the functionality as if it were installed on their computer. Individual users get to use the Office suite for a modest monthly fee (up to $6) without having to pay the hefty price for the full package while companies no longer need a tech department to maintain and administer Office onsite. Microsoft meanwhile get a steady revenue stream every month and perhaps most importantly, guaranteed income from lucrative updates to Office which users will be obliged to pay for to continue using the service.

Sounds too good to be true? Let's take a look:

When you sign-up for Office 365, you have to create a domain name for yourself which isn't too painful. This domain (yourname@yourorganisation.onmicrosoft.com) will be used for all of your Office 365 activities:

When you log-in, you're presented with the main dashboard. Office 365 will then attempt to setup with Outlook Online, Lync Online and Sharepoint Online. This can take a few minutes:

Thunderbird, the open source mail client from Mozilla, has just been updated to version 5.0 bringing more stability, speed and features to users.

Amongst the most important improvements are a new Gecko 5 engine, new Add-ons Manager and a revised account creation wizard to improve email setup.

Tabbed messaging, one of Thunderbird's strongest features, now supports reordering and dragging tabs into different windows. Attachment sizes are now displayed along with attachments, plugins can now be loaded in RSS feeds by default and there are several theme fixes for Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Mac users can now enjoy support for 32 and 64 bit Universal builds but Thunderbird no longer supports PPC Macs. Altogether, Mozilla claim there have been over 390 platform fixes that improve speed, performance, stability and security.

Download Thunderbird for Windows or Mac and let us know what you think!

Remember when you bought your computer and it booted in just seconds? Those were the good old days when Windows didn’t have to deal with a bunch of apps set to run on system startup!

Many programs add themselves to this auto-run list, but you don’t really need them to launch on Windows startup. They end up wasting space in the system tray and hogging system resources, so let’s see how to get rid of them.

The first - and most simple - way to super-speed your startup is using the default Windows utility, Msconfig. Click the Start menu button, select Run and type msconfig in Windows XP, or just type msconfig into Windows 7 search . You’ll see something similar to this:

Go to the Startup tab and uncheck any app that doesn't need to launch on Windows startup. Then hit OK and you’re done. Easy, isn’t it?

The office suite NeoOffice for Mac is no longer free as of version 3.2. The popular package, which is based on OpenOffice but has been modified for Macs, has always been free up until now but those that want to download the latest version are required to make a donation before doing so. The developers have posted a message on their download page saying:

The NeoOffice project is funded solely by donations from NeoOffice users like yourself. As a way to thank our donors who make the NeoOffice project possible, NeoOffice 3.2 can be downloaded by all NeoOffice donors who have donated US$10 (or €7 or £6 or CA$10 or AU$10 or ¥834) or more within the last year.

$10 is still a very modest contribution to what is an excellent alternative to Microsoft Office. However, version 3.1.2 is still free although unlike 3.2.0, it's not prepared for the forthcoming release of Lion so don't be surprised if it stops working when you upgrade.

A download link for NeoOffice 3.1.2 and 3.2 is available here.

How do you keep your Windows desktop under control? Fences is an easy way to organize and up clean your desktop. It groups your desktop icons intelligently, containing them in attractive and customizable 'fences'.

As you'll see, using Fences is a cinch, and will transform even the messiest desktop into a sea of tranquility and order:

First, download and run Fences. It will ask you whether you want to start using fences now, or create fences yourself. Do the former, as you can always configure your fences later.

Now click Start Using Fences, and you'll immediately be given two options. For a quick fix, choose Sort out my icons, and Fences will group your icons and organize them for you. You can the choose a layout that suits you, although the automatic setting already looks very neat:

Fences automatically backs up your old desktop configurations, so you can easily undo anything it changes. One neat Fences trick is the desktop double click - do it and all your icons will be hidden. Another double click brings them back, making it an excellent digital version of sweeping things under the carpet!

Have you tried Fences? What apps do you use to keep your desktop clutter-free?

[via OnSoftware ES]