A picture paints a thousand words – and adding one to an email can really help get your point across, making your communication clearer.

Now you can add a screenshot to your mail directly from within Outlook – by using the Insert, Screenshot dialog on the ribbon..

Clicking this allows you to select the open window you want to copy, and then crop the image down to fit your needs.

Now there is no excuse for clipping a small part of a webpage to show someone via email. Easy to use and no fuss.

A new feature surfaced in Bing recently – type in a marque and model of a car, and the search returns some essential data before the standard results. Very useful if you are comparing models of cars.

What new feature is your business adding to stay ahead?

I’m really pleased to see that the product I worked with for 4 years (I was in the team that supported search advertising), has thrown off the Beta tag today and finally launched.

That means all the great features of Bing are now available in the UK – including Visual Search (previously), Instant Answers (try this) and the ever changing, beautiful home page, are all now live.

The full features of Bing are over at the DiscoverBing site. Congratulations to those in the team that are turning Bing into a decision engine!

By coincidence, I’m here in Seattle on the day that Windows 7 is released, its one of my quarterly visits to the mother ship to sync with my team, who are busily engaged in building a great support experience for Online Services and BPOS. I enjoy coming here and hanging with some really bright people and ensuring that I am involved in interesting and valuable projects, but today the focus will be elsewhere on the Redmond campus.

It is a happy coincidence to be here on a launch day – those don’t come around too often, and they seem like fun occasions. I’m not going to wax lyrical about the OS, I’ve been using it for a while and I find it quick, stable and easy to use, and there will thousands of news and blog articles about how good and bad it is, and how Microsoft is either brilliant or diabolical.

Whatever.

I’m really looking forward to seeing the spectacle – enjoying the buzz, and hoping that the whole release is a success. I’m proud of my job, and the company that I work for – and days like these make me realise why.

Despite having two Zunes at home (a new HD and a 30), we still have three iPods on the go, and despite loads of changes – I am still not a fan of iTunes. Here are three alternatives the bloated Apple client.

• DoubleTwist – available for both the PC and the Mac, DoubleTwist is a full featured client that allows music to be downloaded to a number of devices including the iPod. The current release allows the Amazon MP3 store to be used to replicate the iTunes experience, as well as allowing video to be converted and loaded to your device.
• Anapod Explorer – from Red Chair software allows you to load music directly from Windows Explorer to your iPod and has a number of companion tools for backing up and recovering your precious shiny MP3 player.
• DOPISP – daft name, useful software that integrates your iPod with Windows Media Player, works with Windows 7 and is a lovely integration. I’ve used this for a while, and it has never let me down.

What other tools are you using to escape the Apple hegemony?

You’ve decided to be awesome, your toolset is in place, your workplace is ergonomic and your productivity is up, nothing can stop you now. Can it?

Losing data is the number one fear for most information workers as they come to rely on their PC’s and mobile devices for almost everything they do. I propose you take 30 minutes to check out some of these options available to protect yourself and your data.

• Online Backups – consider backing up your data to an online service, it is a click and forget process to set up and ensure that you have continuous incremental backups running to a service like Carbonite or Mozy. I keep my essential work data in Live Mesh – which replicates it across machines, giving me the added benefit of being able to access it from any PC.
• Security software – make sure you have up to date and reliable security software (firewall, anti-virus, anti spam etc) – Symantec, McAfee are all available at a price – and new to the block is the free Microsoft Security Essentials – I’ve been using this on Beta for a while and it’s very reliable, lightweight and unobtrusive.
• Encryption – your data is important, right? Then consider encrypting your data on your drive (including portable), again you can pay for this, but there are free products closer than you think. I use BitLocker to encrypt my laptop and any USB drives that I use, its free and included in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

What else are you doing to make sure your data is secure and your work stays safe?

So, like many others, you’ve started to use Bing as your search engine – maybe it’s the visual search, or the awesome maps and birds eye views.

However, it may be as simple as the beautiful pictures on the homepage – which change daily and provide great eye-candy as you make one of your many searches each day. You may even have thought that you would like to set one as your desktop wallpaper.

Now a site allows you to do that easily – Bing Images – shows all the homepage pictures for the US and UK (sometimes they are different – and other markets are selectable) and allows you click an image, and then set as wallpaper.

Update – another site does similar but automagically – site is in french, but you can make the application work in English.

A great chance to see Steve Ballmer in action as he answers your questions at ‘The New Efficiency’, a launch event for Windows 7, Exchange 2010 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

At The New Efficiency site you can submit your own questions, and watch the live webcast.

I like the fact that my company are engaging like this – I think the old Microsoft may just have done a press junket, and maybe tried to get all the influential peeps in one place – this seems like a great way to get involved and maybe see your question answered by the big fella himself.

What are you doing to evangelise to your customers?

Bing continues to see a number of enhancements – and seems to be garnering attention and gaining small amounts of market share. Bing is becoming the Purple Cow, remarkable in its features.

Today, the Bing team rolled out visual search, which allows searchers to find product information from a scrollable interface (does require SilverLight), then using filters in the navigation, narrowing down your search visually to find the info you need.

Some of the searches are just amazing to play with – I particularly like movies at the cinema and the awesome digital camera search (try that and narrow down the features you need to get to a cool gallery of the right cameras).

It even appears that Bing is a BETTER place to search for iPhone applications than iTunes itself.

To make your site absolutely the best it can be, you need to have a great search facility to allow your visitors to drill down to the content they need. Now you can add a Bing search box to your site (just like the one over to the right).

Bing is the search engine from Microsoft, and it just keeps getting better and better, crisp results, cool features and a high pace of development makes it a growing choice amongst web users.

To install a Bing search box is really easy – there are only 4 steps to search perfection:

1. Visit Bing Box – part of the services provided by Bing – and click ‘get started’ on the advanced search box option.
2. Enter your site details and the URL of the site(s) you want search – it can be up to 10 – then click ‘next’.
3. Edit the language and dimensions of the search results – the click ‘next’ – you may need to tinker with the width of the search box, and any colour requirements you have to blend in with the theme of your site.
4. Copy the code snippet to where you want the search box to appear – I used a Wordpress text widget which allowed me to paste the code internally and edit the title – so the search box now sits in the sidebar of my blog.

A very cool and tidy integration – and lets your readers get the maximum out of your site.

How else should site owners be pimping their web pages?