Monday, October 17th, 2011
Shape images and Clip Art in Word 2010
There is a healthy range of free clip art available from Microsoft and it includes some photos including content from iStockPhoto.com. However, the process of getting them into your document any other way than by choosing Insert > Clip Art is not always obvious.
Here’s how to add a clip art image to a circle shape:
Choose Insert > Shape and select the Oval. Hold Shift as you draw to create a circle on the screen. If you choose Drawing Tools > Format > Shape Fill you get the option of applying a picture to the shape but not clip art.
Instead, right click the shape and choose Format Shape to get access to the new to Word 2010 – Format Shape dialog. Choose Fill > Picture or Texture Fill and click the Clip Art button.
Browse or search for an image. You could also have placed a Clip Art image into your document using Insert > Clip Art and then selected it and cut it to the Clipboard. Here in this dialog you can choose Clipboard to add the image from the clipboard – in short you have more options here for using image than you have using the Shape Fill list.
If the image is skewed out of shape – and it will be if it is a portrait or landscape image inside a circle which is pretty much a square with the corners cut off – you can adjust it.
Select Crop and, for a landscape orientation image inside a circle, increase the Picture Position Width value. For a portrait orientation image inside a circle, increase the Picture Position: Height value.
Then adjust the Offset X or Offset Y values, if desired, to control which portion of the image shows up inside the circle.
Labels: clip art, images, Microsoft Word 2010, photos, pictures in shapes, shapes, Word 2010
Friday, October 14th, 2011
Reformatting pasted text in Word
I recently grabbed some text from an email that I’d sent to someone. The text was in numbered point form and I wanted to add some more items inside the list of points. This is where everything started to go hair-raisingly wrong.
It seemed as if my list was no longer reformatting correctly and the numbers were everywhere. Worse still, that old standby of copying and pasting formats using the FormatPainter didn’t fix the problem.
By selecting the Show/Hide¶ icon on the Home tab in Word I immediately saw the problem. Instead of paragraph marks at the end of each paragraph there were bent arrows indicating a manual line break. I didn’t put them there but the email software had.
To get my list back to something that I could work with, I needed to quickly replace the manual line breaks with paragraph breaks.
If you open the Find and Replace dialog and click in the Find What: box you immediately see the problem – how do I tell it what a manual line break is and what a paragraph break is? The solution is to click the More button to show more options. Then click Special to get access to the Manual Line Break character. It’s actually a carat and what looks like a pipe symbol but it’s easiest to get this by clicking this by clicking Manual Line Break because the pipe symbol on the keyboard isn’t the right one – go figure!
Then click in the Replace With box and select the Paragraph Mark - this one you can type manually as it is carat + p (^p) but since you’re there why not click to insert it instead. Now click Less to return the dialog to what it looked like before and click Replace All to turn all the manual line breaks back to regular paragraph marks. Now my numbering worked just fine.
Labels: find and replace, manual line break, paragraph marker, special characters, Word
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
Excel – get the day or month name from a date
Often you will want to extract a month or day of the week from an Excel date. This is extraordinarily easy to do using the text function.
To get the name of the day of the week from a date in, for example, cell A1 type this into another cell:
= TEXT(A1,”dddd”)
This will give you the full day name spelled out such as Monday or Tuesday.
If you want a three character name use:
= TEXT(A1,”ddd”)
The same basic formula can be used to get the month of the year from a date. Use this to get the month name spelled out in full:
= TEXT(A1,”mmmm”)
Use this to get the month of the year spelled out in three characters:
= TEXT(A1,”mmm”)
and this for a single letter month:
= TEXT(A1,”mmmmm”)
This formula can be easily constructed and copied down a column of dates to extract just the information you want very quickly and easily.
The Excel help file has some information about the different formats you can use to extract data using the TEXT function.
Labels: day of the week from a date, Excel 2007, Excel 2010, functions, month name from a date
Thursday, October 6th, 2011
Switch between open documents in Excel and Word
Hmmm … I am fussy, I want my cake and I want to eat it too!
I want to have a clean task bar so I don’t want to see lots of files lined up there so I love Windows 7 and its clean task bar. But I find the new panel that opens when I right click an icon on the task bar to be just a little bit too free with information. I really want it to show me a list of currently open files – not everything that I have open or have recently opened. Actually I could live with the information it gives me if I didn’t have to actually use it to switch windows.
So, problem is… how can I switch between open documents in Excel or Word, for example, without having to use the Windows task bar? Solution is to use the Switch Windows button. I add it to the QAT (Quick Access Toolbar) and it totally makes sense to me.
In Excel or Word, click the Customize Quick Access Toolbar button and choose More Commands. From the list which currently shows Popular Commands choose All Commands and scroll to find the Switch Windows button and click Add.
Now it is on the QAT and it will show you all your open files and you can use it to switch between them by just clicking on the one to go to. Repeat the process for both Excel and Word and you’ll be happy – at least until something else bugs you!
Labels: Excel 2007, Excel 2010, filenames on task bar, Switch between open documents, switch between open worksheets, Windows 7, Word 2007, Word 2010, workbooks
Monday, October 3rd, 2011
Go To a cell in a formula in Excel
Consider this scenario – you have a cell which contains a link to data in another cell on another sheet. The link might be the only thing in the cell or it might be a link in a formula which contains references to data in lots of other cells too.
If you want to go to a particular referenced cell you could read off the cell details – its sheet name and its cell reference and navigate there yourself or you could get smart and have Excel do the work.
To do this, click in the cell containing the reference and choose Formulas > Trace Precedents. When you do this you will see a small sheet icon and an arrow with a black arrow head pointing at the cell. Hold your mouse cursor over the arrow until the mouse cursor turns into a hollow white arrow. Double click and the Go To dialog will open. In it will be references to all the cells in the formula. Click the reference you are interested in going to and the cell reference will be highlighted – click Ok and Excel will take you direct to that cell.
If you have both workbooks open the same process will work to take you to a cell in another workbook if it is referred to in a formula in the current workbook.
Labels: Excel 2007, Excel 2010, go to a cell, go to a cell on another sheet, go to a cell on another workbook, trace precedents
Thursday, September 29th, 2011
iPad 2 – Delete multiple emails at a time
There are a few ways to delete multiple emails at a time on the iPad, none of them particularly intuitive and there is no big Select All option so it has to be done individually:
Start by turning the iPad into landscape mode and click the inbox. If you click the Edit button (top left) then you can select multiple emails to delete very quickly. Then click the Delete button which appears bottom left.
To make sure I don’t have too many emails to deal with at a time, this is how I have my email account configured:
First of all, because I deal with email on my desktop, I don’t want the iPad to delete emails from the server so that option, in Settings > Email is set to Never. To find it, click your account name and click Advanced.
Then I set the Remove option in this same dialog to After one day.
All these settings and actions make checking emails on the iPad a fairly simple process – but I, like you, wish there were smarter Select All and Delete All options.
Labels: all emails, delete all, delete multiple emails, delete multiple emails at once, ipad 2, select multiple emails
Tuesday, September 27th, 2011
Timeline in Microsoft Word 2010
The new SmartArt feature in Word 2007 and 2010 helps you create timelines very easily:
Step 1
Choose Insert -> SmartArt -> Process and select one of the process options such as Basic Timeline and click Ok. Type the text into the textboxes in the SmartArt object. Alternately, click the arrows at the far left of the object and add text via the dialog.
Step 2
To format the timeline SmartArt, select the object and choose Format -> Design on the Ribbon and then select one of the SmartArt Styles. Click Change Colors to alter the colours used in your SmartArt object.
Step 3
From the Shape Effects list you can customise an effect such as reflection or shadow for the art. In addition, as the look of a SmartArt object is controlled by the document theme you can choose Page Layout -> Themes and select an alternate theme for your document.
Labels: how to, Microsoft Word, smart art, SmartArt, timeline, Tutorial, Word 2007, Word 2010
Saturday, September 24th, 2011
iPad 2 -Blog to a self hosted WordPress blog
Ok, the challenge is how do you blog from your iPad to a self-hosted WordPress blog and how do you do it with images from your iPad?
Well, the actual blogging part is simplicity itself. Just crank up Safari and log in to your WordPress dashboard. From there you can do almost anything you want – except the one thing you really want to do – add images from your iPad to your post!
Ok. So, Safari is a great place to work in but we have to solve the image problem and for that we use the WordPress app for the iPad – good news is that it is free so download it from the store and get it started.
Then in the WordPress app you can add your blog – you just type its URL including the /wordpress/wp-admin bit and type your ID and password. You only do this once.
Here you will likely encounter a problem that your blog isn’t configured to allow this type of editing. You will get this message that XML-RPC services are disabled.
What you need to do is to go to your computer and log in to your blog using an admin account – if it is your blog, then chances are you are an admin anyway. Then go to the Settings group on the left and click Writing. Then, locate the Remote Publishing area and enable the “WordPress, Moveable type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols”. Once you have done this you’re ok to go and your blog will be added to the WordPress app. If you have multiple blogs you can add more than one, which is smart.
Now, the big reason why we’re using the WordPress iPad app is that it lets us get images up to our WordPress blog so you don’t have to write your content in the app but you do have to upload your images using it so you can get them from the Gallery later on.
So, first of all crop your images and rotate them – I find it easier to do this on the iPad and you can use any program you like – I use Photoshop Express but you can use anything.
Now click on your blog name to get access to your WordPress site on your server. You will see some links at the foot of the screen which take you to the various parts of your site – click the Posts button to view your posts and click the little Add button at the top of the panel on the left to add a new post. Here you type the post content.
To add images, click Done and then find the little icon in the bottom right that looks like a landscape image – click it and add images from your Camera Roll.
Regardless of where you are when you do this all the images go one after the other into the post… this is the sucky part but it really is a small issue – at least they are there!
Before you leave the WordPress iPad app, click Done and click the Settings button (bottom Left) and set a Schedule for the post – I make this a day or more but at least an hour so ahead of time so I have enough time to fix the image issue back in WordPress in Safari before everything goes live.
Now, still in the WordPress app, go ahead and Upload and Update everything. Then go back to Safari and log in to your blog.
By the way, I haven’t mentioned it yet, but it really helps to have one of those bluetooth keyboards so you have arrow keys and you can use shortcuts to copy and paste and select stuff. It beats working with your fingers on the screen – if you’re serious about blogging on the iPad you really need one. I use the Zagg one which I really like.
Back in WordPress on Safari I just delete all the code which has been added for the images as they are seldom where I want them to be. Now I move into position in the post and add the images using the regular WordPress Add Image button – the pictures are all in the Gallery – thanks to the WordPress app.
In WordPress in Safari I can do things like add Captions and descriptions and scale any image that need resizing.
On a scale of 1 to 10 it would be easier to be able to do everything from inside Safari or inside the WordPress app but I wouldn’t call this difficult or unnecessarily cumbersome. I can live with the slight workaround for the sake of being able to blog with images from the iPad in WordPress to a self hosted blog.
I’d rate it around a 7/10 ease of use and functionality and I love it. In fact this is the last big issue I’ve had with the iPad and not being able to blog to my WordPress blogs would have been a deal breaker for me. I need to be able to blog on the road and I want to do this with images – in particular as I am doing an apple a day blog over at my design site and looking at heaps of cool iPad apps so not being able to include images would be horrible!
Labels: apps, blogging with the ipad, how to blog with the ipad, ipad 2, self hosted, upload images to Wordpress blog, Wordpress app, Wordpress self-hosted blog
Thursday, September 22nd, 2011
Warn of tracked changes in Word 2010
Microsoft Word 2010 has some great security settings but I am continually disappointed that Microsoft hides them away so they are so difficult to find.
One of these settings is crucial to enable so you don’t accidentally send a document out to a client with, for example, a comment in it saying what a idiot your client is. The revelation that you think they are an idiot might be news to them – and you’re not going to look too smart yourself.
The culprit is tracked changes. It is all to easy to have Tracked Changes enabled but to have your document show only the final version of the text. Behind the scenes every insertion and deletion is being stored in the document even if you aren’t seeing it. However the information will be accessible to anyone viewing that document – not a smart idea!
If you don’t think this is a big deal you might be interested to know that lots of smart people have been caught out by it, including Microsoft itself. This blog post showcases stories of businesses and government caught out by tracked changes.
To stop this happening to you, you can do a few things but I like the method that you set once and, from there on, Word will do the work for you. This involves having Word tell you if a document you are about to print or save has tracked changes in it. Ignore the warning at your own risk!
To configure this, choose File > Options > Trust Center and click Trust Center Settings then Privacy Options. Enable the “Warn before printing, saving or sending a file that contains tracked changes or comments” checkbox.
Now, in future, Word will show a warning if a document contains tracked changes even if they are hidden from sight.
It should be on by default and it should be easier to find… but there it is… and don’t say I didn’t warn you about it.
Labels: document security, Microsoft Word 2010, tracked changes
Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
Edit Excel files on the go
If you have access to a PC and an internet connection then your options for working with an Excel spreadsheet away from your desk are good – thanks to the Microsoft Office WebApps. Even though many of the advanced Excel tools you are used to using offline won’t be accessible online they won’t be destroyed by opening a file in the Excel WebApp either. You can view charts and filtered table data and features such as the new Slicers in an Excel 2010 PivotTable can be used to work with the data.
Of all the cloud based apps, including Google Docs, the Microsoft WebApps are your best option for working with Excel spreadsheets in the cloud when you are away from your desk and the apps are free.
You can sign up for a free SkyDrive account at skydrive.live.com and that’s where you get access to the WebApps which include Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote. I selected to upload this file then view it in the Excel viewer. To work on it beyond selecting options in the Slicers I can click Edit in Browser to open the file in the free cut down version of Excel online.
One benefit to using SkyDrive is that you can upload files from your local computer to SkyDrive where they are stored for you. You can work on the files online and later download them to your computer when you want to work on them there.
Labels: cloud Excel, Editing Excel files online, Excel 2010, Excel viewer, Excel WebApps, free Excel
Wednesday, July 6th, 2011
Dreamweaver – Properties inspector missing buttons
If you’re using Dreamweaver on a large monitor, you may encounter a difficulty with the Properties panel (Inspector) not showing all the icons you expect to see.
For example, in the image below the Quick Tag Editor, Help button and the Expand button are all missing from the Properties panel.
Only when the Dreamweaver window is expanded to a much larger size do these buttons appear.
So, unless you know what is happening you will find that key tools for working in Dreamweaver are missing. If you are creating an image map, for example, not being able to see to click the Expand button means all your Map tools are hidden.
So, if you find the Expand button is missing on your Dreamweaver Properties panel you can do one of three things. Either make the Dreamweaver window very large so that you can see the Expand/Collapse icon or drag the Properties panel free of the Dreamweaver screen so it is no longer docked. As soon as it’s undocked the buttons appear again. Or… and this is a cool trick, double click anywhere in an empty space in the Properties panel and the hidden buttons appear.
Hiding buttons is REALLY ANNOYING behavior particularly when you know there’s an icon or feature that’s supposed to be on the Properties panel and it’s simply not appearing when it should.
Labels: Dreamweaver, missing buttons, properties inspector, properties panel
Friday, July 1st, 2011
Outlook 2010: backup gets worse (if that’s possible)
If you thought Microsoft has, over the years, right royally messed up the process of backing up your Outlook PST files then the situation with Outlook 2010 has only got worse.
For Outlook 2002, 2003 and 2007 users Microsoft provided a Personal Folders Backup Tool that you could download from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=9003 which would install a backup routine into Outlook.
Having done this you could then select File > Backup to backup your PST file.
Over the years of course, this has prompted questions as to why the thing wasn’t built in to Outlook in the first place? It is a stupid and ill-considered omission in my book, but let’s put that aside for now because the problem only gets worse for Outlook 2010 users.
You see the Personal Folders Backup Add-In doesn’t work with Outlook 2010.
As I say repeatedly it’s Microsoft’s world and we just live in it. Microsoft knows that there’s a problem and explains that the failure of the add-in is due to the new fast shutdown functionality in Outlook. If you visit this website http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2030523 you can click the Fix It For Me link and Microsoft will fix the problem for you.
Don’t even bother asking why there is a problem in the first place. There should be (and it’s inexcusable that there is not) a backup routine built in to Outlook to make it easy for you to backup your PST file.
Consider this – everything you receive or send via email is in that PST file – and that includes attachments! Lose it and you lose the lot. Worse still, there is a physical limit to its size – beyond around 2GB the thing can become horribly unstable. So you will need to back it up or risk losing it all if your computer crashes or the thing becomes corrupt.
So, if your using Outlook 2010, run (don’t walk) to this site: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=9003 and download and install the Personal Folders Back up tool for Outlook 2002, 2003 and 2007 (yep! I know you’re using Outlook 2010! Then go to this site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2030523 and run the Fix It Tool – you have to have the backup tool installed first.
If you don’t like clicking Fix It buttons then there’s a detailed explanation in that same Knowledge Base article explaining how to fix the problem manually – basically it’s a fairly simple registry fix.
Labels: backup, download, Outlook 2010, problems
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011
DIY Color Changing Clip Art
Much of the illustration Clip Art in the Microsoft Clip Organizer can be edited by changing its colors. By doing this you can not only recolor the art to match the look of your document but, if you use Theme colors then the art will change color when the Theme or Color scheme changes.
Now you won’t need information technology degrees to learn this – but maybe you’ll be so good at it, you just might consider graphic design college.
So, let’s see how the recoloring is done. First select the Clip Art and from the Picture Tools -> Format tab click the Group > Ungroup button. Answer Yes if you are prompted to convert the image to a Microsoft Office Drawing Object. In some applications such as Publisher you’ll need to repeat the process and select Ungroup again.
Now click on individual parts of the object and either remove them or recolor them by selecting a Shape Fill Color from the Drawing Tools > Format tab. If you use Theme colors then the colors will change later on when the theme changes.
When you are done and you have recolored all the pieces you want to recolor, select all the pieces, right click and choose Group.
Change the document theme or Color Scheme to see the image change color to match the look of the theme.
Labels: clip art, color scheme, Excel 2010, Microsoft Office, Publisher 2010, recolor, theme, Word 2010
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
Word – joining up short lines
One of my readers – Joe – recently asked for some help regarding removing spaces in Word. He thought that the problem with the text was additional spaces, but when I looked into it, it appears that something else is causing the issue.
Here is a piece of sample text and you can see that it is a series of short lines which my reader wants to make into one continuous paragraph.
To see what is causing him issues click the Show/Hide¶ button on the Home tab of the Word Ribbon.
At the end of each line you will find either a Paragraph Marker or a Manual Line Break – each is different and you need to work out which you have at the end of each line. Also determine if there is a space before each of the markers. If there is not a space you will need to add it yourself. Here is a mix of both markers but no spaces:
To make the lines flow into each other, from the Home tab on the Ribbon click the Replace option. If you need to replace Paragraph Markers, enter ^p into the Find What box. If you need to replace a Manual Line Break then enter ^l (lower case L) into the Find What box.
If you need to add a space, click in the Replace With box and press the Spacebar once – if you don’t need to add a space, then leave the Replace With box empty.
Click Find Next and then click Replace. Check to make sure the replacement is working as expected. If it is, click Replace All and lines will be joined together into a single paragraph of text.
Typically you only have to replace one type of marker and not both, but if you have both, then you will need to find and replace each individually.
When you’re done click Show/Hide¶ again to hide the extra characters from view.
Labels: find and replace, remove spaces, Word 2003, Word 2007, Word 2010
Tuesday, June 14th, 2011
Help! My Excel Chart Columns are too Skinny
It’s probably happened to you, you’ve created an Excel chart and the columns are so narrow they are almost unreadable. The chart is ugly and it appears as if there’s nothing that you can do because nothing that should work does work.
The problem typically happens when you have a chart with an X axis that is has date data and where you aren’t plotting every day but, instead, for example, one day a week.
The solution is to click the X axis of the chart so that you have it selected, right click and choose Format Axis. From the Axis Options panel, select Text Axis. This turns your skinny bars into something a lot more attractive.
If the bars still not thick enough – and typically, for me, they aren’t – click on one bar to select the series, right click and choose Format Data Series. From the Series options, decrease the Gap Width value to around 35 percent. This option won’t work unless you first set the X axis to a Text axis although you and I both wish it would!
Labels: chart, column width, date axis, Excel 2010, gap