Saturday, February 10th, 2007
My Photoshop Articles
In the past few month’s I’ve written some cool articles for InformIT on Photoshop, here are a few of them:
Misunderstood Photoshop: Blend If
Here I explore Blend If, a smart Photoshop blending tool that can be used to knock out an object from its background or to blend two images. The article also includes a video tutorial so you can easily follow along.
Misunderstood Photoshop: The History Brush
Photoshop’s History Brush is great for fixing those little “oops” moments when you’ve messed up an image, but it also lets you use previous states of the image to create new effects. Helen Bradley shows why the History Brush should be a valued member of your Photoshop toolkit in this article and video tutorial.
Create Art: Make Your Own Photo Background
If the background of your picture is getting more attention than the subjects in the foreground, try Helen Bradley’s Photoshop trick for making the background more attractive and a lot less distracting.
Enjoy!
Labels: InformIT, Photoshop articles
Thursday, February 8th, 2007
Posting to an Outlook folder
Try this scenario: you’re working in Outlook and you want to add a note to your inbox – perhaps instead of emailing your work address someone emails your home email address and you want to keep your work emails up to date so you want to note the conversation in your inbox. Here’s how to do it, using a Post:
- Click the folder to post into so you have it open.
- Choose File, New, Post in this folder and type your note – in my scenario it would be details from the email but it could, conceivably, be anything.
- Click the Post button on the toolbar and the note will be saved into the folder – you’ll know it isn’t an email because it has a special icon but it behaves like one so you can open and view it.
I love Posts. They’re are a handy way of recording information in an email folder when it’s there that you’d expect to find it.
Labels: emails, folders, notes, Outlook, Post in this folder
Thursday, February 8th, 2007
Excel 2007 goes total color!
It’s always been confusing to me and my readers why you have an unlimited number of colors to choose from in Word but only a handful of really ugly colors to use in Excel. It doesn’t make sense – do Word users have better design skills than Excel uses – do they think that those of us who create worksheets somehow won’t be blindsided by how ugly the color combinations we’re being served up are?
Well, if you’ve been hankering after a rich color palette for your worksheets, you need do so no more. Excel 2007 gives you access to a full range of 16 million colors from the colors dialog so that you can use these colors, for example, for formatting text, charts or drawn objects. You can also select a Theme which gives you instant access to colors that are selected from the same monochromatic group and guaranteed to look great together. The new and very colorful options in Excel 2007 are guaranteed to wow you!
Labels: 16 million, color, Excel 2007, Excel tip, theme
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007
Calculating elapsed time in Excel
It’s a common enough scenario – you want to know how old you are in months or days or the number of days left in the year. There appears to be no Excel function for calculating the difference between two dates. Not so! there is a function and it’s called Datedif.
The Excel Datedif function isn’t well known because it is largely undocumented in the Excel help files. Its purpose is to calculate the difference between two dates and it can do this by measure the distance using one of these attributes: “m” for months, “d” for days, “y” for years.
So this formula calculates the difference in months between FirstDate and SecondDate:
=Datedif(FirstDate,SecondDate,”m”)
Replace “m” with “y” to get the result in years etc..
Always ensure that the first date occurs earlier than the second or you’ll get an error.
Labels: date functions, Datedif, elapsed time, Excel tip
Monday, February 5th, 2007
Using special characters in Word documents
I write for UK magazines so I often have to use pounds symbols and my mum’s and brother’s surnames have an ‘e’ with an accute accent – unfortunately neither is on my keyboard. So, to make things easier to write, I use a macro to convert a word to a typed character.
Here’s a sample you can use and adapt. It converts the words cents, pounds, degrees and division to their character equivalents and you can use it to replace almost any word or character with another single character, word or phrase of your choosing:
Sub ConvertText()
FindAndReplace “cents”, “¢”
FindAndReplace “pounds”, “£”
FindAndReplace “degrees”, “º”
FindAndReplace “division”, “÷”
End Sub
Sub FindAndReplace(FindThisWord, ReplaceWithWord)
Set EditRange = ActiveDocument.Content
EditRange.Find.ClearFormatting
EditRange.Find.Execute FindText:=FindThisWord, ReplaceWith:=ReplaceWithWord, MatchCase:=0, Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub
Labels: Macro, replace character, special symbols., Word
Thursday, February 1st, 2007
Align anything in Word
When you want to make sure everything on a Word page lines up properly, display the gridlines.
To do this, first display the Drawing toolbar then choose Draw, Grid and choose the Display gridlines on screen checkbox. Set the Use Margins option to start the grid aligned on the left and top margins. Set the value to 1 for small squares and to 2 or 3 for a larger grid.
If you select the Snap Objects to Grid checkbox all objects will automatically line up against the grid.
If you don’t want this to be the case, press the Alt key as you drag an object and it will be freed from snapping to align to the grid.
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
Snap an Excel range
Take a picture of a range in Excel to insert into Word as a picture or to place as an image in another area on a workbook. To do this, first select the area to snap and hold Shift as you open the Edit menu. Choose Copy Picture, select As shown on screen or As shown when printed and click Ok.
You can now paste the image wherever you desire. This Shift + Edit menu option also works for copying a clip art or other type of image inserted into an Excel workbook.
Tuesday, January 30th, 2007
Random numbers in Excel
When you’re testing a workbook it is handy to be able to fill a set of cells with a sample value. The Randbetween function included in the Analysis Tookpak does this for you.
To enable this, choose Tools, Add-Ins and enable the checkbox for the Analysis Toolpak. Now write the function, for example, this provides a random number between 1 and 100 (including both numbers):
=randbetween(1,100)
Copy it to all the cells to fill. To fix the values so they don’t change each time something in the worksheet changes, select the cells with the formula, choose Edit, Copy then Edit, Paste Special, Values.
Labels: analysis toolpak, Excel tip, Randbetween, random numbers
Sunday, January 28th, 2007
Quick Calculations in Word
Older versions of Word included a Calculate option on the Tools menu which let you make quick calculations.
You can add it back into later versions of Word by right clicking any toolbar and choose Customize. Select the Commands tab and, from the Categories list choose All Commands and scroll the Commands list to locate ToolsCalculate. Drag this onto the Tools menu and hold your mouse there until the menu opens and then drop the option into place. If desired, right click it and remove the word Tools from its name so it simply reads Calculate.
Now test it by typing some values eg 24, 25 & 26 and select them. Choose Tools, Calculate and the status bar will display “The result of the calculation is 75”.
If you later click Control + V you will paste the result of the calculation (75) into your document.
To sum a column of numbers, hold Alt as you drag over the column with your mouse then choose Tools, Calculate. It also works inside tables and you can type a more detailed calculations such as 25*25 and it will calculate the result for you (answer: 625)
Labels: add, calculations, column, math, Word