April 3, 2009

The “Smooth” Presentation Quick Move

If you use MS PowerPoint presentations as frequently as I do, you probably find it best to know as many little tricks as possible to make each presentation go smoothly. Am I right?

I'm sure most of you have discovered the tools in the bottom left hand corner of your presentation. You know, the ones you use with the mouse to navigate, draw, etc.

Those are certainly handy gadgets to have, especially if you're trying to jump to a slide somewhere else in your presentation.

I like them just fine, but for moving to another slide, I've never really liked that my audience can see me search through a list of slides to make a jump. It always seems "unpolished" to me.

However, buy viagra online canada if you know the number of the slide you need to jump to, you don't need to go through the tools. You can avoid the "unpolished" effect they may cause!

To jump to any slide while giving a presentation, simply enter the slide number and then hit the Enter key. (I realize that means you'll need to know the number of the slide you want to go to, but if you have a few key points of interest, those numbers may be easier to remember than what you think).

Yep, that's it!

If you want to go to slide number 26, type in the number 26 and hit Enter.

Now, that's what I call a smooth move!

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March 4, 2009

Shape Up Your WordArt

Do you often find you want WordArt in your document, but you actually only want it to appear to be inside a shape?

What did you do?

You could create the shape and the WordArt separately and then group them together. With older versions of the MS Office Suite, that's pretty much what you're going to have to do.

But if you have one of the newer versions of Office, you could actually put the WordArt inside the shape pretty much the same way you'd enter regular text into a shape. (Just a side note: I couldn't get my Office XP to do this trick, so it will have to be newer than that).

Now, I'm sure someone out there is wondering why you'd want to do this at all.

That's a good question and I think I have a pretty good reason as to why it's a good plan!

It's a purely practical reason if there ever was one. If the WordArt is actually inside the shape as its text, when you resize or move your shape, it also affects the WordArt. One stop formatting works for me, how about you?!

Assuming this sounds like a good plan to you, here's what you need to know to make this tip work for you.

  • First, insert the shape.

  • The second step is to right click on the shape and choose Add Text from the menu that pops up.

  • You'll now find your cursor inside the shape. While it's still in there, you need to start and create the needed WordArt.

That's it! Once the WordArt is created, it's in the shape and it will change as necessary to match any changes made to the shape.

I found that if I changed the size of the WordArt, the shape would adjust in size too.

On the other hand, if you change the size of the shape, the WordArt stays the same size and adjusts its position within the shape, just as regular text would do.

However, when relocating the shape, the WordArt always goes with it.

I should add that there were very few times I tried this one and wasn't happy with the outcome. So, it's not perfect, but overall, I love it and it's definitely worth the time to learn how to do it!

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February 21, 2009

More email security tips

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  • Date: November 11th, 2008
  • Author: Chad Perrin

Email security is about a lot more than just using a good password on your POP or IMAP server. Perhaps the most important part of email security is ensuring you don’t shoot yourself in the foot.


In February this year, I listed five basic email security tips that everyone should employ. The following is a list of five more good pieces of email security advice:

  1. Turn off automated addressing features. As communication software accumulates more and more automated convenience features, we’ll see more and more cases of accidentally selecting the wrong recipients. A prime example is Microsoft Outlook’s “dreaded auto-fill feature“, where it is all too easy to accidentally select a recipient adjacent to your intended recipient in the drop-down list. This can be particularly problematic when discussing private matters such as business secrets.
  2. Use BCC when sending to multiple recipients. It’s a bad idea, from a security perspective, to share email addresses with people who have no need for them. It is also rude to share someone’s email address with strangers without permission. Every time you send out an email to multiple recipients with all the recipients’ names in the To: or CC: fields, you’re sharing all those email addresses with all the recipients. Email addresses that are not explicitly meant to be shared with the entire world should, in emails addressed to multiple recipients, be specified in the BCC: field — because each person will then be able to see that he or she is a recipient, but will not be able to see the email addresses of anyone else in the BCC: field.
  3. Save emails only in a safe place. No amount of encryption for sent emails will protect your privacy effectively if, after receiving and decrypting an email, you then store it in plain text on a machine to which other people have access. Sarah Palin found out the hard way that Webmail providers don’t do as good a job of ensuring stored email privacy as we might like, and many users’ personal computers are not exactly set up with security in mind, as in the case of someone whose MS Windows home directory is set up as a CIFS share with a weak password.
  4. Only use private accounts for private emails. Any email you share with the world is likely to get targeted by spammers — both for purposes of sending mail to it and spoofing that email address in the From: field of the email headers. The more spammers and phishers spoof your email address that way, the more likely your email address is to end up on spam blocker blacklists used by ISPs and lazy mail server sysadmins, and the more likely you are to have problems with your emails not getting to their intended recipients.
  5. Double-check the recipient, every time — especially on mailing lists. Accidentally replying directly to someone who sent an email to a mailing list, when you meant to reply to the list, isn’t a huge security issue. It can be kind of inconvenient, though, especially when you might never notice your email didn’t actually get to the mailing list. The converse, however, can be a real problem: if you accidentally send something to the list that was intended strictly for a specific individual, you may end up publicly saying something embarrassing or, worse, accidentally divulging secrets to hundreds of people you don’t even know.
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Basic e-mail security tips

  • Date: February 25th, 2008
  • Author: Chad Perrin

There’s a lot of information out there about securing your e-mail. safe cialis Much of it is advanced and doesn’t apply to the typical end user. Configuring spam filters such as SpamAssassin, setting up encrypted authentication on mail servers, and e-mail gateway virus scanner management are not basic end-user tasks.

When one can find end-user e-mail security tips, they’re usually specific to a single mail client or mail user agent such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, or Mutt. This sort of information is of critical importance to many users of these applications, but there are few sources of more general security information for e-mail users that aren’t specific to a given client application.

The following is a short list of some important security tips that apply to all e-mail users — not just users of a specific application. They are listed in the order one should employ them, from the first priority to the last. This priority is affected not only by how important a given tip is, but also by how easy it is to employ; the easier something is to do, the more likely one is to actually do it and move on to the next tip.

  1. Never allow an e-mail client to fully render HTML or XHTML e-mails without careful thought. At the absolute most, if you have a mail client such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird that can render HTML e-mails, you should configure it to render only simplified HTML rather than rich HTML — or “Original HTML” as some clients label the option. Even better is to configure it to render only plain text. When rendering HTML, you run the risk of identifying yourself as a valid recipient of spam or getting successfully phished by some malicious security cracker or identity thief. My personal preference is, in fact, to use a mail user agent that is normally incapable of rendering HTML e-mail at all, showing everything as plain text instead.
  2. If the privacy of your data is important to you, use a local POP3 or IMAP client to retrieve e-mail. This means avoiding the use of Web-based e-mail services such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail for e-mail you wish to keep private for any reason. Even if your Webmail service provider’s policies seem sufficiently privacy-oriented to you, that doesn’t mean that employees won’t occasionally break the rules. Some providers are accused of selling e-mail addresses to spamming “partners.” Even supposedly security-oriented Webmail services such as Hushmail can often be less than diligent in providing security to their users’ e-mail.
  3. It’s always a good idea to ensure that your e-mail authentication process is encrypted, even if the e-mail itself is not. The reason for this is simple: You do not want some malicious security cracker “listening in” on your authentication session with the mail server. If someone does this, that person can then send e-mails as you, receive your e-mail, and generally cause all kinds of problems for you (including spammers). Check with your ISP’s policies to determine whether authentication is encrypted and even how it is encrypted (so you might be able to determine how trivial it is to crack the encryption scheme used).
  4. Digitally sign your e-mails. As long as you observe good security practices with e-mail in general, it is highly unlikely that anyone else will ever have the opportunity to usurp your identity for purposes of e-mail, but it is still a possibility. If you use an encryption tool such as PGP or GnuPG to digitally sign your e-mails, though, recipients who have your public key will be able to determine that nobody could have sent the e-mail in question without having access to your private key — and you should definitely have a private key that is well protected.
  5. If, for some reason, you absolutely positively must access an e-mail account that does not authorize over an encrypted connection, never access that account from a public or otherwise unsecured network. Ever. Under any circumstances.

Be aware of both your virtual and physical surroundings when communicating via e-mail. Be careful. Trust no one that you do not absolutely have to trust, and recognize the dangers and potential consequences of that trust.

Your e-mail security does not just affect you; it affects others, as well, if your e-mail account is compromised. Even if the e-mail account itself is not compromised, your computer may be if you do not take reasonable care with how you deal with e-mails — and that, in turn, can lead to affecting both you and others adversely as well.

Don’t be a victim.

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How do I… Add music and narration to a PowerPoint presentation?

  • Date: March 4th, 2008
  • Author: Susan Harkins

The best presentations engage the audience using a number of creative tools. Sound effects, such as music and voice recordings can mean the difference between a good presentation and an outstanding presentation. You can energize your audience with a quick tempo, play your company’s latest jingle, or add narration to an on-demand presentation. At the very least, you can play music at the beginning and ending of a presentation as the audience enters and leaves the room. The only limits are good taste and your imagination.

This blog post is also available in PDF form as a TechRepublic download.

About sound files

Microsoft PowerPoint supports media clips, which include sound and video files. The computer playing your presentation will need a sound card and speakers. That doesn’t mean just the system you use to create the presentation, but any system on which you might play the presentation. Today, most systems come with everything you need, but older systems might need an upgrade. (It’s highly unlikely that you’ll encounter such an old system, but don’t rely on that — check it out first!)

Table A lists the media files PowerPoint supports, although this article deals only with sound files.

Table A: Media support

File

Explanation

Attributes

MIDI Musical Instrument Digital Interface Sound
WAV Microsoft Windows audio format Sound
MPEG Motion Picture Exerts Group Standard video format with a constant frame per second rate
AVI Microsoft Windows video format Video format with a constant frame rate per second
GIF Graphical Interface Format 256 color picture that supports animation.

Like most special effects, sound can catch the attention of your audience and convey a message or emotion in a way words or pictures can’t. On the other hand, used poorly, sound can be distracting or even annoying. As always, your purpose will determine how much, if any, sound your presentation needs.

The basics — inserting sound

Including sound is as simple as selecting a file:

Use existing clips by double-clicking one of the Title, Text and Media Clip layouts from the Slide Layout task pane. Double-click the media clip icon shown in Figure A to launch the Media Clip dialog box.

Figure A

Choose a media slide from the Slide Layout task pane

When you double-click a WAV or MIDI file, PowerPoint displays the prompt shown in Figure B. The options Automatically and When Clicked are self-explanatory.

Figure B

PowerPoint will play the sound file when the slide is current, or you can click the icon to play it

Work with unique sound files by choosing Movies and Sound from the Insert menu and then selecting Sound From File or Sound From Clip Organizer. You can also record sound or play a track from a CD. After selecting a file, PowerPoint prompts you to specify how to execute the file (see Figure B).

If PowerPoint doesn’t support a clip’s format, choose Object from the Insert menu and choose the appropriate object type. Alternately, you can convert the file to a supported type. Use a search engine to search for “video file conversion.” However, don’t be surprised if the converted file is less than satisfactory. It’s difficult to maintain quality when converting media files.

In PowerPoint 2007, you’ll find the Sound option in the Media Clips group on the Insert tab.

PowerPoint displays a sound clip as a small icon, which shows during Slide Show view. When the presentation plays the clip automatically, you might want to hide the icon. There’s really no good reason to display it.

To hide the icon, right-click the icon and choose Edit Sound Object from the resulting submenu. In the Sound Options dialog box, shown in Figure C, check the Hide Sound Icon During Slide Show option, and click OK. Double-click the icon in PowerPoint 2007 to find these options.

Figure C

Edit the file’s attributes

If you choose the click option, it’s worth mentioning that clicking the icon a second time doesn’t disable the sound — the file plays from beginning to end once you click it. In PowerPoint 2007, clicking the icon restarts the file.

To learn just how long a file lasts, right-click the icon and choose Edit Sound Object. The file’s playing time is in the Information section at the bottom (see Figure C). If you want the file to play continuously, while the slide is current, check the Loop Until Stopped option. Moving to the next or previous slide will cancel the loop.

Narrating a presentation

To record a unique sound or message, you’ll need a microphone. Unfortunately, some microphones that come with today’s systems aren’t very sophisticated. If you record someone talking, it may sound distorted when played. Suddenly, you may have a lisp or an accent! Specialized software can clear up some problems, but they’re expensive and that’s just one more piece of software you’ll have to learn. It might be more efficient to invest in a better microphone.

PowerPoint makes it easy to narrate a presentation, which is a plus in a Web-based, automated, or on-demand presentation. You might also use this feature to include a statement from an individual, such as a celebrity or your company’s CEO.

Don’t jump right into recording. First, write a script and rehearse it. Once you’re comfortable with your speaking part, you can record your narration:

  1. Choose Record Narration from the Slide Show menu to open the Record Narration dialog box. In PowerPoint 2007, this option is in the Set Up group on the Slide Show tab.
  2. Click Set Microphone Level to check your microphone. Read the sentence that appears in the Microphone Check dialog and let the Microphone Wizard adjust your microphone automatically. Click OK.
  3. If you need to adjust the quality to CD, radio, or telephone, click Change Quality to open the Sound Selection dialog box. Just remember that quality increases the file’s size. If file size is a concern, you may have to compromise quality just a bit.
  4. By default, PowerPoint stores the narration with the presentation. To store the sound file in a separate WAV file (in the same folder) check Link Narrations In. Click Browse to change the location of the separate WAV file, but use caution when doing so — only store the two separately when you have a good reason for doing so. If a sound file is over 50MB, you must link it.
  5. Click OK and start recording. As PowerPoint displays your presentation, you narrate just as you want the message played. Continue to narrate each slide until you’re done.
  6. At the end of the presentation, PowerPoint will prompt you to save the timings with each slide. This can be helpful if you didn’t get each slide just prescription cialis right and you need more practice.

Step five mentions linked files. If you’re using the same system to both create and show the presentation, linked files are fine, but not necessary. Linked files are a good choice if the sound files are large or if you plan to change the source file. By default, PowerPoint automatically links sound files that are larger than 100KB.

To change this setting, choose Options from the Tools menu, and then click the General tab and update the Link Sounds With File Size Great Than option. PowerPoint 2007 users will find this option by clicking the Office button, clicking the PowerPoint options button (at the bottom right) and then choosing Advanced. The option is in the Save section.

Use the Package for CD (PowerPoint 2003) or Pack And Go Wizard (PowerPoint 2002) to make sure you save linked files with the presentation. Names can be problematic: A linked file’s path name must be 128 characters or less.

More options

Narration is only one type of recoding you might consider. If you can record it, you can include it in your presentation. To record a single message or unique sound, choose Movies and Sound from the Insert menu and choose Record Sound. In PowerPoint 2007, this option is in the Sound option’s dropdown list, in the Media Clips group on the Insert tab.

In the resulting Record Sound dialog box shown in Figure D, enter a description and name. Click Record when you’re ready to begin. Click Stop when you’re done. Use Play to listen to the new recording. Click OK to save the sound with the presentation. Or, click Cancel to exit and try again. If you save a sound, it appears as an icon, which you can use anywhere in the presentation you like. Mix this capability with action settings for a unique effect. Just don’t over do it!

Figure D

You can record sounds inside PowerPoint

Playing a CD

Playing music is a great way to begin or end a presentation. However, the music doesn’t have to be a top 10 tune. It only needs to be appropriate. For example, you might play Mendelssohn’s Wedding March if your presentation is about catering receptions. Or, pleasing dinner music might be the way to go. It’s really up to you; just keep your audience in mind. To include a song from a CD, do the following:

  1. Insert the CD.
  2. From the Insert menu, choose Movies and Sound. Then, select Play CD Auto Track to open the Insert CD Audio dialog box. In PowerPoint 2007, choose Play CD Audio Track from the Sound option’s dropdown list. You’ll find this option in the Media Clips group on the Insert tab.
    • The Start At Time and End At Time fields let you capture just part of a track instead of using the entire track.
    • Use the Sound Volume button to control the audio’s volume.
    • Check the Hide While Not playing option in the Display Options section if you don’t want the audio’s icon to show when the music isn’t playing.
  3. Click OK when you’re done. PowerPoint lets you play the track by clicking or displaying the slide.

Like other sound files, Power Point displays a CD icon on the current slide. Just be careful that you don’t violate any copyright laws when including someone else’s music in your presentation.

A word on animation

You can use custom animation to control sound files to add a unique and creative dimension to your presentation. To get started, select a sound icon and display the Custom Animation task pane. PowerPoint offers a ton of options, and does a good job of disabling inappropriate choices for the selected clip.

Creating custom animation can be complicated and the truth is most presentations won’t need that much energy. However, the feature’s there and you might as well learn a bit about it. There’s an entire tab dedicated to animation in PowerPoint 2007. Click the Custom Animations option in the Animations group to create custom effects.

Design for effect

Multimedia files can liven up any presentation and sound is definitely part of that mix. You can play an appropriate tune or your company’s jingle. With one click, you can play your company’s latest radio ad for the head honchos. Whether you’re pitching a new product or sharing photos of your new baby, use sound to set the mood.

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