Joe Kissell

Email providers such as Gmail and iCloud make it easy to store your old messages by the thousands, but finding one of those messages in your desktop email program is sometimes tricky. The Lion version of Apple Mail includes useful new search features, but also adds complexity and confusion to the process of finding messages. You can locate the messages you want, quickly and easily, by following some simple steps and learning a few pro tricks.

The easiest way to find something is to type one or more words in the Search box and see what shows up in the message list--you need not even press Return. By default, Mail looks for whatever you typed in the contents of all your messages. However, you can narrow down your searches in several ways.

Among other things, the iPad is a great way to save paper: It lets you carry around all kinds of digital documents that you might otherwise have had to print.

But from time to time you may still need to print data that's on your iPad--business documents that you created in Pages and Numbers, for example, or driving directions to hand someone who's not packing silicon. Printing from the iPad can be easy if your needs are modest, but even if you require extensive printing control, there is, as they say, an app for that.

As the iPad ecosystem expands and matures, it becomes easier to leave your laptop behind and accomplish much of your business work on Apple's tablet computer. If you only need to viewMicrosoft Excel files, you don't need extra software, because iOS natively displays .xls and .xlsx files. Several fine tools also exist for creating and editing even large and moderately complex spreadsheets on an iPad, but because no iPad version of Excel exists, you may have to jump through a few extra hoops, give up some functionality, or both.

Transferring Files

As regular Macworld readers may know, I'm a big proponent of the paperless office; I even wrote an e-book about it, Take Control of Your Paperless Office . Besides eliminating as many sources of incoming and outgoing paper as I can, I scan pretty much every piece of paper I receive, convert it to searchable PDF format, and then recycle or shred the originals (except when there's some important legal reason to hang onto them). But a few years ago I took an even bigger step, which was switching to paperless postal mail. I pulled this off thanks to a company called Earth Class Mail, which has saved me untold time and effort (not to mention paper clutter).

The concept is straightforward. You sign up for an account, fill out a USPS form granting Earth Class Mail permission to receive mail on your behalf, and then change your mailing address to point to one of its addresses (in any of 19 cities around the country) rather than your home or office. When a piece of mail arrives for you at Earth Class Mail, the company scans the outside of it (or, if it's a large package, takes a picture of the box) and sends you an e-mail notification. You can then log in to the company's secure Website to view this image and request that Earth Class Mail do any of several things:

Look around. Do stacks of paper cover your desk and crowd the corners of your keyboard? Do you ever wish you could find and use paper documents as easily as digital ones? Whether you're tired of the clutter or want to modernize your workflow, it may be time to take steps in the direction of a paperless future.

Back in 2007, I wrote an article ("The Real Paperless Office") that covered the basics of scanning paper documents and turning them into searchable PDF files. Since then, interest in the paperless office has grown steadily, as has the selection of relevant hardware and software products geared toward Mac users. Here's an updated look at the tools and techniques you need to make it happen.

The assignment seemed straightforward: to compare PowerPoint 2011 ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ) with Keynote '09 ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ) by creating the same presentation in each. (Macworld did the same thing a few years ago, comparing PowerPoint 2008 with Keynote '08.) But the more I worked with each app, the clearer it became that such feature-for-feature comparisons really miss the point.

Both programs have some remarkably clever tricks up their respective sleeves-and some equally remarkable omissions. As a result, they take dramatically different approaches to many steps in the presentation-creation process. The question, then, isn't so much which one is better overall, but rather which one has the specific set of bells and whistles you need for the kinds of presentations you create.

The last time Macworld reviewed MobileMe was in July 2008, shortly after the service made the transition from .Mac. Since then, Apple's suite of Internet services has undergone numerous additional changes, but has it has kept up with the competition?

I'll look first at the three core features--e-mail, syncing, and iDisk--and move on to the remaining parts of the service, with an emphasis on what has changed since 2008.

Since its introduction as part of OS X 10.5 Leopard in 2007, Time Machine has given Mac users an easy way to back up and restore files. From the beginning, though, Time Machine's design has made it less than ideal for certain backup needs (see "Is Time Machine all you need?"). As time has passed, backup products have evolved. How does Time Machine compare to the competition today?

Time Machine upgrades

If you've already upgraded to Microsoft Office 2011 from an earlier edition--or are considering doing so--you probably know that e-mail, calendars, and contacts are now handled by a new application called Outlook ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ) rather than Entourage ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ). Switching to Outlook need not be traumatic, but it's different enough that you may be disoriented at first, or have trouble figuring out how to do a few basic tasks. These tips will get you started.

Getting oriented

Your fingers may have to learn some new habits. A number of common keyboard shortcuts changed between Entourage 2008 and Outlook 2011, and some even took on the opposite meaning!

First, the good news: most shortcuts remained the same, including such universal combinations as Command-N for New, Command-Z for Undo, and Command-C for Copy. Although Outlook 2011 adds many new shortcuts that don't exist at all in Entourage 2008, at least those won't trip you up as you're learning the application.

As soon as your collection of Apple devices running OS X or iOS expands to two or more, the issue of syncing is bound to come up. You'll want most or all of the important personal data on your first device--e-mail, calendars, contacts, notes, and more--to be identical on your second device, and you'll want to be able to update the data in either place and have the changes reflected in the other.

That basic scenario isn't difficult to achieve, but it gets more complicated as the number of variables increases. Add more data types, more devices, different operating systems and versions, cloud-based services, push sync, and other niceties, and pretty soon you have an inscrutable tangle of connections.

Although the methods I've outlined for syncing your data with MobileMe and Google are effective for most people, they aren't the only means of keeping your data in sync between devices. A great many other syncing products and services exist. Here is a small sampling.

Calendars