February 5, 2009

Print a graphic in an Excel header — sort of

  • Date: September 26th, 2008
  • Author: Susan Harkins

Word lets you insert a graphic into a document’s header or footer. Excel’s not so flexible, but you can cheat. Insert the graphic and specify it using the Print Titles feature. Excel will print the graphic at the top of each printed page, which is really what you want — header or not.

The first step is to get the graphic into the workbook. Try to insert it into cell A1 and then adjust the cell’s height to accommodate it, but that might not work. Depending on the size of the graphic, Excel might insert cialis c10 it as is, usurping several rows and columns. To insert a graphic, choose Picture from the Insert menu, select From File, locate the file, and then click Insert. In Excel 2007, click Picture in the Illustrations group on the Insert tab.

september2008blog9fig1r.jpg

The next step is to identify the graphic using the Titles feature as follows:

  1. Choose Page Setup from the File menu and click the Sheet tab. In Excel 2007, the Page Setup group is on the Page Layout tab.
  2. Click the row or drag across the rows that contain the graphic. Or enter the rows in the Rows To Repeat At Top control. For instance, the RabbitTracks graphic (above) covers rows 1, 2, and 3. Therefore, you’d enter $1:$3. When you finish, click OK.

september2008blog9fig2r.jpg

     

Click Print Preview to view the graphic on all pages of the worksheet. You can’t really tell, but the following picture shows the second page of a long sheet, and each page displays the same graphic at the top.

september2008blog9fig3r.jpg

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Create your own AutoContent templates for building presentations

  • Date: September 30th, 2008
  • Author: Susan Harkins

PowerPoint’s AutoContent wizard gives you a head start on setting up a presentation based on various prefab templates. But you can also plug your own presentations into the wizard, making it easy to reuse their design, structure, and content.


The AutoContent Wizard is a great place to start when you’re not sure what a presentation should cover. This wizard creates a new presentation using built-in templates, offering content ideas to help you organize the information you include on each slide.

What you might not know is that you can add an existing presentation to the AutoContent Wizard’s library. To do so, follow these steps:

  1. Launch the wizard by choosing New from the File menu.
  2. Click the From AutoContent Wizard link in the New Presentation task pane.
  3. Click Next in the wizard’s first pane.
  4. Choose the most appropriate content template category from the list (Figure A) and click Add.

Figure A

  1. Locate the presentation you want to use as a content template and click OK.
  2. Proceed through the rest of the wizard’s prompts.

The presentation you added is now available to use as a template when you run the AutoContent Wizard.

Don’t cialis buying let a good generic presentation go to waste. You’ll still have to customize it to suit your particular purpose, but that’s true of any content template you choose.

Notes: The AutoContent Wizard isn’t available in PowerPoint 2007. Instead, use a themed template. Choose File from the Office menu and select New to get started.

Microsoft offers more free templates.

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Change case in your Word documents with easy toggle shortcuts

  • Date: September 30th, 2008
  • Author: Mary Ann Richardson

One of the most common word processing chores is changing the case of text in a document. You can greatly streamline the process if you learn a couple of Word’s most useful keyboard shortcuts.


Do you find yourself continually pressing the Caps Lock key to change from uppercase to lowercase, and vice versa, as you type? While the Caps Lock key is better than having to search for the Change Case commands with the mouse, you can’t use it to change the case of text that has already been typed.

Word does provide a couple of toggle key combinations you can use to change the case of selected text without retyping. For example, say you typed the following text and want to change it to all uppercase:

Caution! To avoid injury, please read all instructions first.

Just select the text and press Ctrl + Shift +A.

You can also use this key cialis buy online combination to change case as you type. Follow these steps:

  1. Press Ctrl + Shift + A.
  2. Type: Caution! To avoid injury, please read all instructions first.
  3. Press Ctrl + Spacebar to return to lowercase.

Another helpful key combination is Shift + F3, which lets you toggle case from lowercase to uppercase and then to initial caps. For example, say you just typed Tcp/Ip. To change it to all uppercase, select it and then press Shift + F3. To change the phrase “All’s well that ends well” to initial caps, select the text and then press and hold the Shift key while you press F3 three times.

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Flash Outlook contacts

  • Date: September 29th, 2008
  • Author: Susan Harkins

If you’re like me, you live and breathe by your contacts. They’re vital to my business, as they probably are to yours. When I’m on the road without cialis buy on line remote access, that can be a problem. I know that I can print my contacts, but taking the .pst file with me is much better. (The .pst file contains your contact information.) It’s a simple process:

  1. From the File menu, choose Import And Export.
  2. Choose Export To A File and click Next.
  3. From the list of file types, choose Personal Folder File (.pst) and click Next.
  4. Select Contacts and click Next.
  5. Save the exported file to your flash drive (or a CD).
  6. Click Finish.

To use the file, you can simply import it into Outlook on another computer. But you should also be prepared to not have access to Outlook. Repeat the above process again, saving your .pst file as Microsoft Excel file and a comma-delimited text file (Comma Separated Values). If the worst happens, you can at least view the information.

Now, you probably already knew that you could export the .pst file. What you might not have considered was how easily you could save that exported file to a flash drive and take it with you.

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10 reasons why you should use the Opera browser

  • Date: September 12th, 2008
  • Author: Jack Wallen

Despite cialis buy cialis online its low profile, Opera offers a host of features that set it apart from the browser pack. According to Jack Wallen, Opera is fast and stable — and it contains many features other browsers can’t touch.


I have gone through many browsers in my lifetime of IT. From Lynx to Mosaic to Mozilla to Netscape to Firefox to Internet Explorer to Safari to Flock. But there’s another browser that peeks its head in and out of that cycle — Opera. Opera is a browser that gets little press in the battle for Internet supremacy. But it’s a browser that is making huge waves in other arenas (Can you say “mobile”?) and is always a steady player in the browser market.

But why would you want to use a browser that gets little love in the market? I will give you 10 good reasons.

Note: This information is also available as a PDF download.

#1: Speed

It seems no matter how many leaps and bounds Firefox and Internet Explorer make, Opera is always able to render pages faster. In both cold and warm starts, Opera beats both Firefox and Internet explorer. We’re not talking about a difference the naked eye is incapable of seeing. The speed difference is actually noticeable. So if you are a speed junky, and most of you are, you should be using Opera for this reason alone.

#2: Speed Dial

Speed Dial is one of those features that generally steals the show with browsers. It’s basically a set of visual bookmarks on one page. To add a page to Speed Dial, you simply click on an empty slot in the Speed Dial page and enter the information.When you have a full page of Speed Dial bookmarks, you can quickly go to the page you want by clicking the related image. For even faster browsing, you can click the Ctrl + * key combination (Where * is the number 1-9 associated with your page as assigned in Speed Dial).

#3: Widgets

Opera Widgets are like Firefox extensions on steroids. Widgets are what the evolution of the Web is all about — little Web-based applications you can run from inside (or, in some cases, outside) your browser. Some of the widgets are useful (such as the  Touch The Sky international weather applet) and some are just fun (such as the Sim Aquarium.) They are just as easy to install as Firefox extensions.

#4: Wand

Save form information and/or passwords with this handy tool. Every time you fill out a form or a password, the Wand will ask you if you want to save the information. When you save information (say a form), a yellow border will appear around the form. The next time you need to fill out that form, click on the Wand button or click Ctrl + Enter, and the information will automatically be filled out for you.

#5: Notes

Have you ever been browsing and wanted to take notes on a page or site (or about something totally unrelated to your Web browsing)? Opera comes complete with a small Notes application that allows you to jot down whatever you need to jot down. To access Note, click on the Tools menu and then click on Notes. The tool itself is incredibly simple to use and equally as handy.

#6: BitTorrent

Yes it is true, Opera has a built-in BitTorrent protocol. And the built-in BitTorrent client is simple to use: Click on a Torrent link, and a dialog will open asking you where you want to download the file. The Torrent client is enabled by default, so if your company doesn’t allow Torrenting, you should probably disable this feature. Note: When downloading Torrents, you will continue to share content until you either stop the download or close the browser.

#7: Display modes

Another unique-to-Opera feature is its display modes, which allows you to quickly switch between Fit To Width and Full Screen mode. Fit To Width mode adjusts the page size to the available screen space while using flexible reformatting. Full Screen mode gives over the entire screen space to browsing. In this mode, you drop all menus and toolbars, leaving only context menus, mouse gestures, and keyboard shortcuts. The latter mode is especially good for smaller screens.

#8: Quick Preferences

The Quick Preferences menu is one of those features the power user will really appreciate. I am quite often using it to enable/disable various features, and not having to open up the Preferences window makes for a much quicker experience. From this menu, you can alter preferences for pop-ups, images, Java/JavaScript, plug-ins, cookies, and proxies. This is perfect when you are one of those users who block cookies all the time, until a site comes along where you want to enable cookies.

#9: Mouse Gestures

This feature tends to  bother most keyboard junkies (those who can’t stand to move their fingers from the keyboard.) But Mouse Gestures is a built-in feature that applies certain actions to specific mouse movements (or actions). For example, you can go back a page by holding down the right mouse button and clicking the left mouse button. This is pretty handy on a laptop, where using the track pad can take more time than you probably want to spend on navigation. But even for those who prefer to keep their hands on the keys and not the mouse, the feature can still save time. Instead of having to get to the mouse, move the mouse to the toolbar, and click a button, you simply have to get your hands to the mouse and make the gesture for the action to take place. Of course, this does require the memorization of the gestures.

#10: Session saving

I love this feature. All too many times, I have needed to close a browser window but didn’t want to lose a page. To keep from losing the page, I would keep a temporary bookmark file where I could house these bookmarks. But with Opera, that’s history. If you have a page (or number of pages) you want to save, you just go to the File menu and then the Sessions submenu and click Save This Session. The next time you open Opera, the same tabs will open. You can also manage your saved sessions so that you can save multiple sessions and delete selected sessions.

The upshot

With just the above list, you can see how easily Opera separates itself from the rest of the crowd. It’s a different beast in the Web browsing space. It’s fast, stable, and cross platform, and it contains many features other browsers can’t touch.

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