• Run GIS software on the largest monitor you can.  The map is the story; make it as good as you can.  Laptops have many good points; a big screen is generally not one of them.  Insure the map windows takes up as much of the screen as possible (menus and toolbars reduce map size) and consider enlarging the map and having scroolbars.  You are ultimately responsible for the quality of your graphics.
• Use multiple monitors if possible.  You frequently will have the program, its help file, a web page for questions and data downloads, and something for documenting your results (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint).  It helps to have the most screen real estate possible.
• Use the phone or a second computer for the help or web browser.

Open Files or Directories

• Many GIS operations require you to open a directory or folder.  A double click on the folder name will not work; you have to highlight the folder, and then click the "Select folder" button.
• To open a file, you can use the open button or double click.
• The windows dialog shows what you are being asked for in the lower right corner.
• If you see nothing in a folder where you know there are files, you are probably in folder selection mode.
• If you see nothing in the folder and you are in file selection mode, you are probably looking for the wrong file extensions.  You can change to all files with the drop down selector, or select the correct extension which keeps you from having to wade through too many files, or type "*.*" in the file name edit at the bottom left.

File Downloads. 

• Insure you pay attention to where you download files.  If you download to the downloads folder, clean it out periodically.  You can do a quick and dirty copy everything into a new old_downloads folder.
• You can set your browser to always ask, which helps you to organize the files, or understand that the files will probably all pile up in the Downloads directory. 
• There are operations that will fail if performed on a file in the downloads directory (e.g. trying to rename it to use GDAL to modify a Geotiff), so you should move the data to another directory.
• Problems with ftp data download?

• Uncheck "Hide Extensions for known file type".   Many GIS "files" such as shapefiles and worldfiles actually consist of multiple files with the same name and different extensions, and you may have to pick the correct one, which is very hard when they all look the same (sometimes the icon will be different, if Windows recognizes the file type, but often the files will all look the same). 
• Display the full path in the address and title bars.
• (Optional) Pick "Show hidden files and folders". 

File Compression. 

• Types of compression
• ZIP files: right click on the file in Windows Explorer, and then pick the "Extract all..." near the top of the list.  MICRODEM can do batch Decompression.
• TAR and GZ and .7Z : use 7zip or the Compress/Decompress option in MICRODEM (which uses 7zip), and is particularly effective for Landsat imagery.
  

Printing Help File

• In the table of contents, pick the topic you want to print, right click, and select print
• Pick to print just that topic, or all subtopics
• For one of the courses
  • You will get the best results by printing one week's lesson topics at a time.
  • Lessons should be finalized before the week starts, but are likely to see minor updates until that point.

Word Reports, when you will be getting electronic edits from a colleague (or even if you will be doing extensive edits)

• Do not use text boxes.  You cannot put a comment in the text box, and the comment wind up far from the text it tries to refer it.  If the editors puts the text inside the text box, it usually has to be resized, and then plays havoc with everything that follows.
• Do not wrap text around the figures.  When there are changes, this can act very unpredictably.
• Do not put two figures side by side.  If you want to do that, make them 1 figure
• Make the figures as big as possible, especially for detailed maps.  If you have no constraints on the number of pages, make the figures big.
• Further suggestions for figures.

Unless the report will be your pride and joy and absolutely needs to look like it was professionally printed, KISS.  There are important parts to formatting (references and figure captions), and others are much less important in a learning environment.