Three small tips for your init.el file.

Set proxy

If you want to use MELPA, ELPA, etc. behind your corporate proxy, you need to configure it in the init file:

(setq url-proxy-services
   '(("no_proxy" . "^\\(localhost\\|10.*\\)")
     ("http" . "10.10.10.10:8080")
     ("https" . "10.10.10.10:8080")))

A good way to get your proxy (unless the admins are cool and just share it) is to get the .dat file, as explained here: https://superuser.com/questions/346372/how-do-i-know-what-proxy-server-im-using

I would also recommended to set the proxy in HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY.

UTF-8

Being a native Spanish speaker, sometimes I drop accented characters, like the á in Sebastián

(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)

The problem seemed to be that the defauls in Emacs and in Windows are different…​or something like that. Whatever the case, this single line solved all my encoding problems.

Dired-launch

I still deal daily with Excel, Word, Outlook, etc. I did replace 99% of Windows Explorer with Dired, and one of the small tools that made a difference for me was dired-launch: https://github.com/thomp/dired-launch Basically what dired-launch does is equivalent to start "" file-path in the command prompt.

I have it bound to J (shift + j) and C-c j, although I think J is the default binding, and for some reason I added an extra one that I’m not using?. Anyway, for Windows there isn’t any other configuration required:

(dired-launch-enable)
(global-set-key (kbd "\C-cj") 'dired-jump)

Now you can launch any type of file from the Dired buffer directly.