Last fall, my nine-year-old granddaughter asked if I had PowerPoint and then proceeded to create a presentation for Social Studies, mostly on her own. I hovered and made suggestions, but she really didn’t need my help. She added a few pictures and a recording of Kentucky’s state song, “My Old Kentucky Home.” She got an A!

The thing is, everybody knows how to use PowerPoint these days, and that can be problematic for the professional. It’s like an amusement park — the more rides you ride, the more thrilling a ride has to be to get your attention. In other words, you now have to work harder than ever to impress your audience. The ordinary just won’t do anymore.

That’s where rich media can make a difference. Rich media is anything other than text: pictures, graphics, video, audio, animated clips, and so on. A little creative power can go a long way. Remember the old saying about a picture’s worth a thousand words? Well, I won’t bore you further with a lot of extraneous verbalization when I can prove what I’m saying with just two slides.

There’s nothing wrong with the above slide, but it’s ordinary and unfortunately rather typical of the average presentation. Your audience won’t remember it. Why should they; there’s nothing memorable about it.

On the other hand, they’ll remember the slide below. Not only will they remember it, they’ll want to know who the child is and where you took the picture. Most important, the slide will implant a pleasant association with you. Now that, they’ll remember.

cialis dosage side effects border=”0″ alt=”september2008blog2fig2r.jpg” width=”320″ height=”240″ />

Word offers special bookmarks that let you automate the process of addressing your envelopes.  Mary Ann Richardson explains this handy feature.

When you need to send the same letter to two or three people, retyping the inside address for each recipient is much easier than using mail merge. But without mail merge, you may think that you need to retype both the return address and the delivery address before printing the envelopes. Fortunately, Word has two special bookmarks you can use to address the envelopes without retyping. Follow these steps:

Figure A

1. Select the delivery address.
2. Go cialis dosage options to Insert | Bookmark.
3. Type EnvelopeAddress in the Bookmark name text box (Figure B) and click Add.

Figure B

1. In Word 2003, go to Tools | Letters And Mailings and click on Envelopes & Labels. In Word 2007, click Mailings and then click Envelopes in the Create Group.
2. Click Print to print the envelope.

Now you can go back to your letter, select the delivery address, and replace it with the delivery address for the next addressee. The new delivery address will automatically appear in the Envelope dialog box — no retyping required.

Your customers will appreciate it if you send them a shipping notification.  See how a  little command button magic allows you to automate the process in your Access forms.

For better customer service, you decide you’d like to send an e-mail message informing customers when their orders have been shipped. However, you don’t want to have your shipping personnel spend time composing those messages. Good news: They don’t have to! You’ve already created a form that your staff uses to enter the Ship Date after an item has been shipped. Just add a Command button, like the one in Figure A, to send a shipping confirmation to the customer’s e-mail address automatically.

Figure A

cialis dosage information align=”justify”>To create the button, follow these steps:

1. Press Alt + Q.

Figure B

Now, when the user enters the ship date and clicks the Send Shipping Confirmation button, Access will compose the e-mail shown in Figure C.

Figure C

The user can review the e-mail and click the Send button. Access will then send the e-mail to the address in the ShipEmail field for that order.

Working day to day, you’ve probably built quite a list of AutoCorrect entries. They help you work more efficiently and for the most part, your list is probably unique to you. Not only are the entries unique to you, that list is unique to your local system. That means if you work on another system or get a new computer, you have to rebuild your list — well, not exactly.

The good news is that you can back up your AutoCorrect entries and take them with you. Run a search using Windows Find File feature for files with the ACL extension — *.acl. Copy those files to a floppy, CD, or even a USB flash drive. Then, copy those files to the appropriate location cialis dosage daily on the new system. I recommend that you rename the existing .acl files rather than just overwriting them. That way, you can revert to the existing .acl files if necessary. This is particularly important if you’re temporarily using someone else’s system. You don’t want to overwrite their entries with yours.

Columns cialis dosage 40 mg are easy to create in Word — usually. Newspaper columns flow from top to bottom and then snake around to the top and down to the bottom again. In Word, you just click a button and like magic, you have newspaper columns. On the other hand, parallel columns are a bit more troublesome. These columns are read left to right. You can use tabs, but the guesswork makes these columns awkward to work with. Moving or deleting a column is difficult at best. Displaying the tab characters make the chore easier, but you still have to delete or move items one by one.

Tina Norris Fields, a Michigan colleague, recently shared an easy way to create parallel columns: Use a table and then inhibit the borders. Now, that’s magic!

Use any method you like to create the table. I usually enter the first few rows and then let Word create the table based on the existing items. If you know the dimensions, you can create the table first and then enter data. It doesn’t really matter. Use the AutoFit format and let Word adjust the table as you enter the columnar data.

When you’re done, turn off the table’s borders as follows:

Word will gray out the borders on screen. However, Word won’t print the borders, which you can easily confirm by viewing the document in Print Preview.

Using the table structure allows you to easily move or even delete parallel columns.