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Tuesday, November 30, 2010 – Permalink –

Nameless Surfing

Masked strangers

Anonymous surfing is exactly what the terms suggests. You go online without revealing any of the personal or technical information on your computer. It's done by having a special computer -- called a proxy server -- screening you from the websites you are contacting. Your computer contacts only the proxy server, which contacts the website for you. The website, in turn, sees only your proxy server and not you. In addition to hiding your IP.

From Ask Bob Rankin:
Anonymous Web Surfing

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Labels: Internet

<Doug Klippert@ 3:29 AM

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Monday, November 29, 2010 – Permalink –

Animation Samples

A little taste

The samples on this site make use of advanced animations that are introduced in PowerPoint 2002/XP and above. They will not run correctly when viewing with PowerPoint 2000 or earlier versions. You are free to use it for your presentation as long as proper credit is given.

Note: The animations found in these presentations or showcases are done entirely using PowerPoint. NO animated gifs, video or flash are used.

Shawn Toh is awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for PowerPoint (MVP PowerPoint) and has been certified as Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS PowerPoint, Word, Excel).

PPTHeaven.MVPS.org

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Labels: PowerPoint

<Doug Klippert@ 3:16 AM

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Sunday, November 28, 2010 – Permalink –

Sunrise/Sunset

Times

Here is a location that will give you times for sun and moon, rise and set,
Civil Twilight, Nautical Twilight. and Astronomical Twilight anywhere in the world.

SunriseSunset.com

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Labels: Addendum

<Doug Klippert@ 3:17 AM

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Saturday, November 27, 2010 – Permalink –

Presentation Tips

Ideas

Unique Presentation Solutions
(See the list of articles under "Creative Techniques" .)

Terberg Design specializes in creating unique presentations. Here is an interview with Julie Terberg from Indezine.com.

PowerPoint Personality

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Labels: PowerPoint

<Doug Klippert@ 3:05 AM

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Friday, November 26, 2010 – Permalink –

Word Calendar Template

Take control

You can print a copy of your calendar in Outlook, but you don't have much control over its formatting.

Here's a solution:
Calendar Printing Assistant for Outlook 2007

Also:

"Customizable Word template for generating and printing Outlook weekly and monthly calendars.

Print any Outlook calendar that you have access to, including calendars from other users' mailboxes and Public Folders.

Add color coding by category or by type of item (one-day event, multiple-day event, etc.)

Specify time and date formats and the title for the calendar.

Freeware.

Outlook 2010 (except 64bit

Office 2000/2002 +

See more at Slipstick.com

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Labels: Outlook

<Doug Klippert@ 3:30 AM

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Thursday, November 25, 2010 – Permalink –

Getting 2010 Reference Guides

Where'd they hide that thing?

Wondering where your favorite Word 2003 commands are located in the new Word 2010 interface? Or just want to explore the rich, new design with a little guidance?

... rest the mouse pointer over a Word 2003 menu or button to learn its new location in Word 2010. To see an animation of the location of the command or button in Word 2010, just click it.

Command reference guides for:

Office 2010

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Labels: Excel, PowerPoint, Word

<Doug Klippert@ 3:54 AM

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Wednesday, November 24, 2010 – Permalink –

Embed Media

Code machine

The code necessary to embed a video or animation file on a web page can be a bother.

The University of California Center for Instructional Technology has a generator that will create the necessary code to insert Flash, Real Media, Quick Time, or Windows Media files using HTML.

Embedded Media HTML Generator

Launch in external player

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Labels: Expression Web, FrontPage, HTML

<Doug Klippert@ 3:24 AM

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Tuesday, November 23, 2010 – Permalink –

Face New Fonts

The free type

UrbanFonts offers over 8,000 free typefaces and dingbats.

The winner is the person who dies with the most ampersands.

UrbanFonts.com

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Labels: Windows

<Doug Klippert@ 3:00 AM

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Monday, November 22, 2010 – Permalink –

Share Your Show

Kinda' tube it

Let's say you spend all your time in PowerPoint. You don't have a video to post somewhere, and you want others to see your work.

Take heart! The solution is here.

You can save your PowerPoint show on the web in "U-Tube"y fashion.

Slideshare.net

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Labels: Internet, PowerPoint

<Doug Klippert@ 3:47 AM

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Sunday, November 21, 2010 – Permalink –

Comment Code

Edit toolbar

You'll many times want to change blocks of code to comments in VBA modules; temporarily convert a block of VBA code to comments so that it's ignored during a trial run. Inserting an apostrophe before each line of code is a bother. Office 2000+ simplifies this task by letting you convert a block of code to comments with a click of a button.

Open any module in the Visual Basic Editor (VBE), and then choose View>Toolbars and choose Edit from the menu bar to display the Edit toolbar.

Select the lines of code that you want to turn into comments. Then, click the Comment Block button on the Edit toolbar (it's the sixth button in from the RIGHT end of the toolbar).
Each line of the selected code is now preceded with an apostrophe.

To convert the comments back to executable code, select the appropriate lines and click the Uncomment Block button, which is immediately to the right of the Comment Block button.
This, of course, works in any application that uses the VBE.

It's been suggested that two or three apostrophes (sometimes called inverted commas) be placed around existing comments. When the Comment Block is used, the original comments will not be removed.

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Labels: Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word

<Doug Klippert@ 3:14 AM

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Saturday, November 20, 2010 – Permalink –

Data Scrutiny Charts

Ways to look closer

Professional statisticians typically have powerful software at their disposal to perform advanced analyses and create slick graphs. But many professionals in the quality field don't enjoy that luxury.

Faced with a limited budget, they must be resourceful with the software they already have. Besides, not everyone needs the capability to perform nonlinear regression with custom loss functions for maximum likelihood!

Fortunately, many occasional data analysts already own a versatile software capable of providing most basic quality analyses -- Microsoft Excel.

Shewhart control charts
Pareto charts
Simple box-and-whisker plots

Excel for Data Analysis

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Labels: Excel

<Doug Klippert@ 3:34 AM

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Friday, November 19, 2010 – Permalink –

Google Searches

Some hints

Google still rules the search engine world. Here are a few tips on how to refine your info-hunt.

Tip #1: Use the Correct Methodology

Tip #2: Conduct an "Either/Or" Search

Tip #3: Include or Exclude Words in Your Search

Tip #4: Search for Similar Words

Tip #5: Search for an Exact Phrase

Tip #6: List Similar Pages

Tip #7: Fine-Tune Your Search with Other Operators

Tip #8: Search for Specific Facts

Tip #9: Search the Google Directory

Tip #10: Use Googles Other Specialized Searches

Ten Tips for Smarter Google Searches

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Labels: Internet

<Doug Klippert@ 3:33 AM

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Thursday, November 18, 2010 – Permalink –

Shortcut Controls

Switch them into shape

There are four ways that Explorer uses to display folders and file.

It will open a single pane window (no Explorer bar).
It will allow the user to navigate out of the folder (i.e. to the folder’s parent and beyond).
The default is for none of the items in a folder to yet be selected.
If there is already an open Explorer window displaying that folder, then the operating system will switch to that existing view, as opposed to opening a new one.

You can display the alternatives by usinf=g switches.

/n forces it to open a new window, even if it duplicates a window that is already open.
/e uses Windows Explorer view (multi-paned).
/root,X restricts Explorer to showing only the contents of file folder X (and its sub-folders).
/select,Y automatically selects Y (either a file or folder).

For a complete explanation, go to: CodeJacked.com

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Labels: Vista, Windows

<Doug Klippert@ 3:48 AM

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Wednesday, November 17, 2010 – Permalink –

Airplanes

modèles de papie

Model Templates for paper airplanes

Also:

Collection of paper airplanes

Build the best paper airplane in the world

Record winning paper airplanes

More sites

Fiddler's Green paper airplane models, some free some for sale

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Labels: Addendum

<Doug Klippert@ 3:24 AM

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Tuesday, November 16, 2010 – Permalink –

Access or Excel

When to use one or the other

Use Access when you:

Require a relational database (multiple tables) to store your data.
Might need to add more tables, in the future, to an originally flat or nonrelational data set.
Keep a very large amount of data (thousands of entries).
Keep data that is mostly text.
Rely on multiple external databases to derive and analyze the data that you need.
Need to maintain constant connectivity to a large external database, such as one built by using Microsoft SQL Server.
Want to run complex queries.
Need many people working in the database and you want robust options that expose that data for updating.

Use Excel when you:

Require a flat or nonrelational view of your data (that is, you do not need a relational database with multiple tables).
This is especially true if that data is mostly numeric - for example, if you want to maintain a financial budget for a given year.
Want to run primarily calculations and statistical comparisons on your data - for example, if you want to show a cost/benefit analysis in your company's budget.

Use Access or Excel to manage your data

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Labels: Access, Excel

<Doug Klippert@ 3:11 AM

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Sunday, November 14, 2010 – Permalink –

Citation and Bibliography

2007+ feature

"What if you write a paper for your literature class, but an educational journal wants to publish it? You used MLA style for formatting the citations and bibliography, but the journal uses APA style. It would be tedious to edit every citation and revise the bibliography to switch them from one style to the other. Fortunately, Office Word 2007 can switch bibliography styles. Choose a different style, and Word automatically reformats all the citations and the bibliography.

What about the next time that you write a paper on a related subject? If your specialty is Mark Twain, you will probably cite many of his same works in more than one paper. Word stores your master list of sources for you. Whenever you start a new paper, you can choose from your list of sources for the citations that you make in that paper."

Academic features: citation & bibliography tools

Previous versions
Footnote, Endnote, and Bibliography Questions

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Labels: Word

<Doug Klippert@ 3:11 AM

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Saturday, November 13, 2010 – Permalink –

Clippy, the April Fool

An unwelcome visitor

"Clippy is a simulated office assistant that, when ran, will hide in the background for 1 minute then popup in the lower right hand corner of the screen and say something useless. Every minute, Clippy pops up spouting useless nonsense about your computer.

That is not all! Clippy comes with a dozen or so default messages, but Clippy can be customized to fit your needs. You can create a clippy.txt file within the same directory as Clippy and when loaded, it will read this file to figure out which hints to blurt to the screen.

Move your mouse pointer to the TOP LEFT corner of your screen. This will stop the program from running in memory. If you have successfully moved your mouse in the correct position, the program will close and display an About Box Screen. Once you close this screen, the program will exit. Exiting the software will allow Windows to delete the file."

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Labels: Vista, Windows

<Doug Klippert@ 3:13 AM

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Friday, November 12, 2010 – Permalink –

Menus Via CSS

Code and directions

"The core of any Web site is the navigation mechanism, the menu. If Web sites are primarily about organizing and presenting content, a site's menu provides the means of traversing this information set.
In designing a Web navigation system, it is often difficult to balance the competing objectives of simplicity, flexibility, usability, and maintainability. Often very simple designs are not flexible; flexible designs trade off with usable ones; and easily maintainable designs are rarely even considered."

Build a Flexible CSS Web Navigation Architecture

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Labels: Expression Web, FrontPage, HTML

<Doug Klippert@ 3:03 AM

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Thursday, November 11, 2010 – Permalink –

How Access Grew

History

A history of Microsoft Access, including key features and milestones from the release of Access 1.0 to Access 2010.

20 years of Access

Also:

Old Access Versions

In Access 1.0, if you found the "Easter egg" list of developers, at the very end there was a pond with two birds floating around.

A large foot then comes down and crushes the pair of ducks. (Paradox was Microsoft's rival at the time.)

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Labels: Access

<Doug Klippert@ 3:28 AM

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Wednesday, November 10, 2010 – Permalink –

Shortcuts

A few good ones

Here are some keyboard shortcuts that can be used when running a show:

N, ENTER, PAGE DOWN, RIGHT ARROW, DOWN ARROW, or the SPACEBAR (or click the mouse)
Perform the next animation or advance to the next slide

P, PAGE UP, LEFT ARROW, UP ARROW, or BACKSPACE
Perform the previous animation or return to the previous slide

number+ENTER
Go to slide number

B or PERIOD
Display a black screen, or return to the slide show from a black screen

W or COMMA
Display a white screen, or return to the slide show from a white screen

S or PLUS SIGN
Stop or restart an automatic slide show

ESC, CTRL+BREAK, or HYPHEN
End a slide show

E
Erase on-screen annotations

H
Go to the next hidden slide

CTRL+P
Redisplay hidden pointer and/or change the pointer to a pen

CTRL+A
Redisplay hidden pointer and/or change the pointer to an arrow

CTRL+H
Hide the pointer and navigation button immediately; prevent the pointer from appearing if your mouse is moved.

CTRL+U
Hide the pointer and navigation button in 15 seconds

SHIFT+F10 (or right-click)
Display the shortcut menu

TAB
Go to the first or next hyperlink on a slide

SHIFT+TAB
Go to the last or previous hyperlink on a slide

ENTER while a hyperlink is selected
Perform the “mouse click” behavior of the selected hyperlink

SHIFT+ENTER while a hyperlink is selected
Perform the “mouse over” behavior of the selected hyperlink

Ctrl-M: New slide
Ctrl-D: Duplicate the current slide
Ctrl-Shift-C: Copy Autoshape style
Ctrl-Shift-V: Paste Autoshape style
Ctrl-Shift G: Group objects
Ctrl-Shift H: Ungroup objects
Shift-F9: Toggle the grid on and off
Alt-F9: Toggle the guides on and off
F5: Start presentation
Right arrow: Next slide or build
Left arrow: Previous slide or build
Home: First slide
End: Last slide

Also see: BitBetter.com See all Topics

Labels: PowerPoint

<Doug Klippert@ 3:42 AM

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Tuesday, November 09, 2010 – Permalink –

Carophile

All things auto

"Jalopnik loves cars.

Secret cars, concept cars, flying cars, vintage cars, tricked-out cars, red cars, black cars, blonde cars
sometimes, cars just because of the curve of a hood."

Jalopnik.com

Like:

In Washington state:
The greenCar Company

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Labels: Addendum

<Doug Klippert@ 3:42 AM

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Monday, November 08, 2010 – Permalink –

SQL Statements Automatically

Hidden code

If you're having trouble figuring out a complex SQL statement for use in code, you may be able to simplify the process by first setting it up the query you want in the query design grid.

Once you've got it configured correctly, choose View >SQL view to reveal the underlying SQL statement, which you can copy and paste into your code.

You may have to make minor modifications, but this technique often eliminates much of the hassle of manually constructing SQL statements.

You can also tweak the underlying SQL code to adjust your Query. This code can also be copied and reused in other Queries after a little customizing.

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Labels: Access

<Doug Klippert@ 3:13 AM

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Sunday, November 07, 2010 – Permalink –

VCards

Pick a card

If you wish to share information about yourself and your company when networking with others a handy solution is electronic business cards, called vCards (virtual business cards), which can be sent using Outlook 2000+.

To send a vCard to an individual, open the contact and on the Actions menu, click "Forward as vCard". Outlook attaches the contact information in a vCard file called .vcf

Note You can automatically include a vCard every time you send a message. Just add the vCard to your signature!

If you want to be able to insert a vCard in a message that you have already started, save the file for that vCard to a convenient location where you can access it.

Open the contact, on the File menu, click "Export to vCard". Specify the location where you want to save the file, and then click Save. When you want to insert the file in an item that you have opened, on the Insert menu in the item, click File, and then select the .vcf file.

In the message that contains the vCard you received, double-click the vCard attachment.
Add any other information you want about the contact, and then on the File menu, click "Save and Close".

How to Use vCard in Outlook

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered: Outlook's Signature and vCard Features

Sharing Microsoft Outlook Calendar and Contacts

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Labels: Outlook

<Doug Klippert@ 3:49 AM

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Saturday, November 06, 2010 – Permalink –

Easy Reading

Clean up the screen

Word 2003 introduced a view of documents that eliminates a lot of the distractions of Task Panes and toolbars.

It's called Reading Layout.

Office.Microsoft.com:
Word Reading Layout View

Demo reading layout view

Infopackets.com
Reading Layout View

In 2007-10 it's View>Full Screen Reading

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Labels: Word

<Doug Klippert@ 3:46 AM

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Friday, November 05, 2010 – Permalink –

Color Safe Not

The other side of the wheel

Death of the Websafe Color Palette?

One of the givens of Web design, the holiest of holy truths, is the sanctity of the 216 websafe color palette. It's a rite of initiation for every Web designer or developer: Use only these colors, we are told, and don't question why.

By David Lehn and Hadley Stern. David is a senior information architect and interface developer in the Milan office of Razorfish. Hadley is a senior designer in Razorfish's Boston office.

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Labels: Expression Web, FrontPage, HTML, Internet

<Doug Klippert@ 3:42 AM

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Thursday, November 04, 2010 – Permalink –

Before Windows

The old days

Here's Guidebook, a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces.

Remember GeoWorks?

How about HP's NewWave.

I bought NewWave when it came out, because surely HP would be beat out those new guys at MS.

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Labels: Windows

<Doug Klippert@ 3:11 AM

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Wednesday, November 03, 2010 – Permalink –

Random Slides

Vary the show

Here is the code that can be used to mix up the order of your slides.

Sub sort_rand()

Dim i As Integer
Dim myvalue As Integer
Dim islides As Integer
islides = ActivePresentation.Slides.Count
For i = 1 To ActivePresentation.Slides.Count
myvalue = Int((i * Rnd) + 1)
ActiveWindow.ViewType = ppViewSlideSorter
ActivePresentation.Slides(myvalue).Select
ActiveWindow.Selection.Cut
ActivePresentation.Slides(islides - 1).Select
ActiveWindow.View.Paste
Next

End Sub

PowerPoint Tools:
Randomize the order of a PowerPoint presentation

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Labels: PowerPoint

<Doug Klippert@ 3:38 AM

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Tuesday, November 02, 2010 – Permalink –

Legal Understanding

See what they mean

Through precise definitions, an act can be compared to what's allowed and what is prohibited.

This very process of clarification can make the statutes difficult for the layman to understand.

" Welcome to Nolo's Legal Glossary, your life-raft in the sea of legal jargon. Do you need to know the meaning of sprinkling trust, toxic tort or some equally puzzling legal term? Look it up here. Our glossary contains plain-English definitions for hundreds of legal terms, from the common to the bizarre."

Toxic tort: A personal injury caused by exposure to a toxic substance, such as asbestos or hazardous waste. Victims can sue for medical expenses, lost wages and pain and suffering.
Willful tort: A harmful act that is committed in an intentional and conscious way. For example, if your neighbor builds an ugly new fence and you intentionally run it down with your truck, that's a willful tort. But accidentally backing into the fence as you pull out of your driveway is not willful, though it's still a tort.

Everybody's Legal Glossary

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Labels: Addendum

<Doug Klippert@ 3:40 AM

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Monday, November 01, 2010 – Permalink –

View Multiple Pages of an Access Report

More than one at a time

When you preview an Access report, you may want to see several pages at one time to examine the layout of the report.

You may know that you can do so by choosing View >Pages from the menu bar. However, this technique limits how you view the pages -- you can only view 1, 2, 4, 8, or 12 at a time.

For more control over how the pages are displayed, right-click on the report preview itself, and choose Multiple Pages from the shortcut menu.

The default layout grid is 2 x 3 pages. However, if you click and drag with your mouse, you can select a range of up to 4 x 5 pages.

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Labels: Access

<Doug Klippert@ 3:33 AM

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