Just when you think you have learned everything there is to know about a certain aspect of SharePoint, someone will casually mention something that you have never seen before. This was the case for me, when Ted Pattison pointed out a well hidden menu that adds some interesting features to the Advanced Web Part Gallery from the SharePoint web UI.
To see it simply bring up the Advanced Web Part Gallery, and click the Browse bar at the top:
I never even realized this was clickable before, but it brings up the ability to Search for web parts or to Import them (the default view is Browse which is the one you are used to). When you switch it to Search, you will see the following:
This allows you to search for web parts, which is nice because sometimes they can hide in the gallery (at least they seem to for me). The other option available is Import, which looks like this:
This one is very useful, especially if you are making repeated changes to a web part and needing to try it out in your site. Rather than go through all the steps of importing into the web part gallery from the site settings menu, you can import the web part one time just to the current page your working on. This simple functionality saved me a bunch of time the other day when I was making changes to the Common View fields of a Content Query Web Part.