If you’re planning a trip to an exciting destination you can now create your own travel itinerary in the Bing search engine. Here’s how:

Sign up to (Microsoft Outlook) and into Bing Maps – see https://www.bing.com/maps

Click on ‘My Places’.

Select the ‘Itineraries’ tab.

Open ‘New Itinerary’.

Select the places you want to go, add the times you had in mind, and click ‘Get Started’.

You can then go through your route and add key sites and attractions with a click, get suggestions, move additions between days, get directions, and add descriptions to the attractions.

In a creative and fun step, the latest update to Microsoft Windows now means that you can achieve maximum personalisation in your written communications by using the ‘Microsoft Font Maker’ to turn your handwriting into a font that you can install and use on your computer. Here’s how (N.B. It works best with a digital pen and tablet):

• Download Microsoft Font Maker: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/microsoft-font-maker/9n9209f8s3vc?activetab=pivot:overviewtab
• Either click the pen icon on the taskbar or manually enter the Settings > Devices > Pen & Windows Ink.
• Launch Font Maker, and write each letter in each box as shown.
• On the next page, write 3 short sentences to tell the program how to space your words.
• Make any final adjustments in the size of font and spacing in the sample page (you’ll be shown this).
• Click the Create button to export your font.
• Save your new font to the fonts folder – go to the File Explorer folder icon on your taskbar, then – This PC > Local Disk > Windows > Fonts, or save it to a known location and then copy and paste it into the fonts folder.
• You can now use a digital version of your own handwriting in popular programs e.g. Word and WordPad.

Microsoft’s Windows 10 contains speech recognition linked to Cortana that allow you to dictate speech through your Windows machine’s microphone, and convert it into typing in a text field. Here’s how to use it:

– Go to Settings.

– Go to Time & Language > Speech > Related settings and click “Speech, inking and typing privacy settings”. This will enable speech services and typing suggestions.

– Use the Windows Key-H hotkey combination in any text field to load a Cortana box that records your voice (through the machine’s microphone).

You may have to type manual punctuation, but you can still save time by dictating emails, messages, and more.

If you sometimes have too many windows open and you need to clear things up and / or get back to the desktop view in Windows 10 as quickly as possible, here are a couple of tips that can help.

Windows 10 has a ‘shake your screen’ feature that enables you to quickly clear all the open windows so you can focus on one. Here’s how it works:

• Grab the window you want to focus on from the top title bar.
• Hold it and shake it. All other open Windows will then automatically minimise.
• Shake it again to bring everything back!

Also, if you need to minimise all your open windows to get back to the desktop quickly:

• Click on the bottom right corner, to the right of the line on your screen. All open windows will minimise. Click it again and all the windows will reappear in their original positions.