From The Tips Box: Vertical Storage, Save Shortcuts, Washing Dishes

Lifehacker readers offer their best tips for storing tea in the office, how to avoid saving over your work, and keeping your dishes clean.

Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments or send it using the contact tab on the right.

Store Anything Vertically with Magnetic Containers from IKEA

Yair Silbermintz shares a recent IKEA find:

This seemed fairly obvious to me, but everyone at my office has been going commenting about it so I figured I would share.

I used to have a whole mess of tea bags (i am trying to taste different regions and improve my palette) on my desk, and the idea to do this. IKEA sells these GRUNDTAL containers for use with their magnetic knife bars. They have a strong magnet on the back that will stick to any flat metal surface (I stuck them to the small window by my door) and a clear cover so I can see what I’m grabbing. Since they are up high and by my door, people spot them on their way by and it has become a good piece for small talk around the office.

Remove the Save Shortcut to Avoid Overwriting Your Documents

MsCassLopez sends along a trick for overzealous savers:

Ok husband trouble! My S.O. writes lots of similar but different letters to his customers. He uses MS Word. He tends to use the first letter as a template for the subsequent ones. However, he’s a dork. The number of times he’s hit the Save shortcut in the Quick Shortcut bar in Word and saved his new letter over his old one…words fail me! Then I have to mess around retrieving his most recent documents.

I initially enabled Track Changes but that had its own problems as he sometimes emailed his documents. Then, I removed the Save shortcut from his shortcut bar. Now he can’t just hit Save without thinking, he has to go to the File menu which gives him thinking time to realise what he’s doing. It works. If you are prone to doing the same then remove the shortcut. It’s not a shortcut if it causes more work. Train yourself.

This won’t help if you’ve already ingrained the Ctrl+S keyboard shortcut into your brain, but for those prone to clicking Save, it can be useful.

Use Only One Set of Dishes to Ensure Their Cleanliness

Casey Brooks keeps up on chores by limiting the number of dishes:

I found myself using dishes in my dorm and not washing them when I was done, and so dirty dishes would pile up. This made it painful and time consuming to wash all the dishes at once. Now I keep only a single set of dishes (one bowl, one cup, one fork, etc.), making it so I really can’t put off washing them. The washing process now takes a fraction of the time and is hardly even a chore! Works great for anyone living on their own.

Photo by Dan Schmidt.

Shortcuts for Windows 7’s Sticky Notes

Moon makes better use of his digital sticky notes:

I have a couple of tips for Sticky Notes in Windows 7:

• You can temporarily increase and reduce the size of text in the application, by using Ctrl and the scroll wheel. The setting doesn’t stick around for the next launch though. Ctrl+Shift+> will let you change text size, for all or part of the sticky note, and the change carries over to the next session.
• If you like, typing “stikynot” in the Run dialog or from Search will bring up the program. Probably a better idea would be to pin it to your Taskbar.
• Ctrl+N opens a new blank note.

I found a lot more shortcuts here, for you interested sticky note users.