Saturday, September 8th, 2007

Photoshop World hits Las Vegas

I’m spending the week in Las Vegas taking in all the best that PSW (Photoshop World to those in the know – now you’re included!) has to offer. It’s a great opportunity to take classes from the likes of Scott Kelby, Matt Kloskowski, Jim DiVitale and photographers Moose Peterson, Joe McNally and Vincent Versace.

My best tip and one I’ve seen quite a few instructors embrace is the crop canvas enlargement. It works like this, you use the crop tool to enlarge the canvas – seriously.

To do it, shrink the image down using the Zoom tool then enlarge the window so you have a little image and a big window. Click the Crop tool and drag it on the image, it won’t go any larger than the image right now – don’t panic.

Let go the mouse now drag the crop marquee handles outwards. Do it on all the sides that you need to add canvas. To do it evenly all around, hold the Alt/Option key as you drag on a corner handle. Check your background color as that’s the one that will be used to fill the new area. Press Return/Enter and you’re done.

Wow… one to show your friends just how good you are – you can now use the Crop tool to make an image bigger!

Helen Bradley

Wednesday, September 5th, 2007

Word 2007 – Help, my SmartArt disappeared

Open a Word 2003 document in Microsoft Office 2007 and click Insert SmartArt. You might be surprised at what you see. The beautiful Word 2007 SmartArt dialog disappears and all you have is the old Word 2003 diagramming tool.

At this point you might wonder exactly what has happened. The answer is that Word is operating in compatibility mode as you can see by looking at the toolbar. To convert the Word 2003 document to 2007 format so that you can use Word 2007 features such as SmartArt and Themes, click the Office button and choose Convert. Once the document is converted you can then use all the lovely new features of Word 2007 even on your older Word documents.

Helen Bradley

Monday, September 3rd, 2007

Random text in Word 2007

In olders versions of Word, you could enter random text into a document using something like this typed in at the beginning of a new line and press Enter:

=rand(2,3)

This gives you 2 paragraphs each of 3 sentences of the text “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” It was not particularly original but it was handy for filler text.

In Word 2007, the news is better still. There are two options:

type

=rand(3)

To get three paragraphs of random text, this time it actaully makes sense and looks like real text.

The best news is, however, that Lorem ipsum can be entered automatically. Now I can remove the AutoText entry I always use to insert this Latin text and do it anywhere, anytime in Word 2007. Here’s what you type:

=lorem()

this gives you a little sampler of text. Type:

=lorem(10)

to get 10 paragraphs of it.

It’s easy to remember and easy to use and, well – thank you Microsoft, I’m impressed!

Helen Bradley

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