What are some useful shortcuts and tips/ tricks for the Ion/Ion XE.

The answer to that depends a bit on the type of show you are doing. Is it going to be very cue based or mostly busked?

One thing that you should probably look at really early on is magic sheets. They let you create a screen with buttons on it that can be simple things like fixtures, groups, focus pallets, colour pallets and also buttons that fire macros. And it 2.6 you can assign one to the button top right of the screen.

Its way easier to quickly pick something whether when setting up cues to record or busking if you dont have to think group 20 is my cyc etc and you can just press a labelled button or colour pallet 12 is that greenish colour and can just press the greenish button. (you can use direct selects for all of this, but if you want everything on the same screen then you may as well skip custom direct selects and go to magic sheets as you have more layout control).

Regarding macros you basically add them whenever you seem to be pressing the same buttons in sequence a lot. You'll probably have a lot more if you are busking as you want to be able to click single buttons on your magic sheet to do either simple eg sneak 5 or @ 30 commands as well as longer sequences eg fading out a colour wheel moving head and changing colour and fading it back up on a single click eg sneak 3 out wait 3 CP 2 wait 1 sneak 3 full or something along those lines.

If you have limited access to the actual console, download etc nomads for free and then you can mess around with all this stuff away from the venue and copy show files back and forth. Its the same software as the console is running.

If you are busking I wrote some more about magic sheets on community.etcconnect.com/.../pc-software-wheelfade

Double taps are very useful, try them out when you get a moment, see what you get and how you can use them :)