Advanced Travel: When those conference calls aren't enough, and a face-to-face meeting is necessary, getting there may (or, more often, may not) be half the fun. The Advanced Travel add-in lets you search multiple travel sites for flights, hotels and rental cars from handy icons lurking on the status bar.

The Basic search uses TravelGrove affiliates, but if you click the appropriate button on the website, Advanced Travel also passes your criteria to Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz or Priceline for flights, adding hotels.com for accommodation and even more options for the car search. Once on any site, you can filter by airline and time of day for flights, and of course book online if you so choose.

Dictionary Tooltip: Baffled by a word in an online document? With the Dictionary Tooltip add-in, all you have to do is highlight it, right-click and choose View Definition. A dialog box opens, showing the definition from your choice of 19 sources. If that definition puzzles you, just select another dictionary.

FoxLingo: If the confusing word is not in English, FoxLingo may help. It describes itself as The Ultimate Language Tool, offering translations of words, selections or complete webpages. It also offers learning tools for would-be linguists.

Multilingual I'm not, but my French is good enough to show me that FoxLingo's translations can be, shall we say, a tad unusual. But you can usually get the gist of the meaning of a translated page, although you may have to stretch your imagination somewhat.

Adblock: OK, so it's not tremendously politically correct to advocate an ad blocker when writing for a site that is supported by advertising, but you must admit that some sites take intrusive advertising to absurd levels. Especially on a slow connection, that can mean wasted time and bandwidth.

For those sites, Adblock is invaluable. All you do is right-click the Adblock tab on an ad to block it and, if you so choose, others from the same purveyor on a specific site. The right-click menu also allows you to remove sites from your block list.

Flashblock: Sometimes the author of a website gets a wee bit carried away, with all sorts of funky Flash and Shockwave animations that add little to the utility and a lot to the loading time. Flashblock stops them dead, displaying instead a clickable button that will run the animation if you really want to see it. It's amazing how much faster you can get to the meat of a site if the glitz is removed!