Queue the Benny Hill music: CIO.com reports that in a recent study, researchers found that employees at large companies (10,000+ workers) spend an average of 38 minutes searching for one document, whether it's on company networks, databases, intranets or local drives.

What a frightening, unnecessary drain on productivity.

Below are five more snags that can tie up employees for hours. With a little basic upfront training, plus assistance from a support desk, these issues could be solved in minutes.

1. Outlook - offline: Networks sometimes hiccup and bump users offline. It's usually so quick that employees do not notice and are reconnected. Still, the reconnection can fail. We've seen people go an entire day without being able to figure it out on their own. If it's a result of an interrupted connection, reconnecting is just a matter of deselecting the "work offline" item in the File menu, or a reboot.

2. Outlook - mailbox full: When a mailbox reaches its limit, Outlook yanks the ability to send e-mails. The next to go is receiving messages. E-mails are held hostage in the Outbox, and the user is tied to his computer until he frees up enough space. Instead of cleaning up a mailbox message by message (which is a common approach and quite tedious), he can organize his mail by size and move large mail to a Personal Folders File (.pst). Once he's caught up, he can set up auto-archiving to prevent future mailbox clogs. A few steps compared to a few hundred.

3. Word - document closed without saving: CTRL+S is the most valuable keyboard shortcut anyone can learn. Left pinky and left ring finger (or left pinky and left middle finger, depending on the size of your hands). Repeat often. It will save your employees hours of retyping and begging IT to trashpick temp folders looking for a document that doesn't exist.

4. Excel - dragging a formula to paste it to thousands of rows: What does an employee do when she has a formula that she needs to copy and paste to 14,000 adjacent rows? If she is like the majority of Excel users, she will grab the bottom right corner of the cell, and drag it down to row 14,000. She'd be better off double-clicking the fill handle (the little black square in the bottom right of the selected cell). When she sees how much time she saves, she'll be thrilled.

5. Windows - meandering through six levels to reach a folder used every day: Say, for example, an employee's files are stored on the Z drive. Within that drive is a folder for his department. Within that department folder is a folder for this fiscal year. Within that is a folder for a specific project. And on and on. He takes this scenic route three to five times a day. If he created a shortcut, he could make the trip in one click.

FIND MORE INFO IN: "How Not to Sabotage Your Whopping Software Investment" | Desktop Application Support | BlackBerry + Mobile Support | PC Helps eTraining | Contact PC Helps

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