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Friday, September 30, 2011 – Permalink –

Crime on the Web

What does it look like?

PC World has an article on e-mail cyber crime, with examples of the notes.

Cyber Crime

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Labels: Internet, Outlook

<Doug Klippert@ 3:24 AM

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Thursday, September 29, 2011 – Permalink –

DNS FAQ

Domain Name System

Here's a concise collection of answers about the inner workings of the internet.

For instance:

What is DNS (Domain Name System)?

Websites have both a "friendly" address, called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and an IP address. People use URLs to find websites, but computers use IP addresses to find websites. DNS translates URLs into IP addresses (and vice versa). For example, if you type http://www.microsoft.com into the address bar in your web browser, your computer sends a request to a DNS server. The DNS server translates the URL into an IP address so that your computer can find the Microsoft web server.

DNS FAQ

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Labels: Internet

<Doug Klippert@ 3:31 AM

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Wednesday, September 28, 2011 – Permalink –

Folding Tips

Bending cloth

Just to break up a boring dinner setting, learn how to fold napkins.

(things to do while waiting for the news)

Napkin Folding Guide

Napkin Folds

Napkin Folding

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Labels: Addendum

<Doug Klippert@ 3:37 AM

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Tuesday, September 27, 2011 – Permalink –

Camera Tool

Smile!

(This is the per-2007 routine. For 2007-10 see the bottom of this tip. )

To create a linked picture of part of a spreadsheet for use elsewhere:

Edit>Copy the Cell or Range
Choose the target cell
Hold down the Shift key and choose Edit>Paste Picture Link

If you're going to do this frequently, go to Tools>Customize. Choose the Commands tab and locate Camera in the Tools category. Drag to place the Camera button on your toolbar.

If the Camera tool is on your toolbar:

Select the Cell/Range
Click the Camera tool
Move the cursor to the target position and click to insert the linked picture

To create a static picture from cells, or a chart to use in another part of your workbook, or another program:

Clear cell gridlines if you do not want them displayed in your picture.
(Click Options on the Tools menu, click the View tab, and then clear the Gridlines check box")
On the worksheet or chart sheet, select the cells or click the chart you want to copy as a picture
Hold down SHIFT and click Copy Picture on the Edit menu
(For the best picture quality, make sure As shown on screen and Picture are selected)
Click OK
Select the worksheet or other document where you want to paste the picture
Edit>Paste.

You can use the Picture toolbar to change the image. (to display the toolbar, right-click any toolbar and choose Picture) To paste information you've copied from another program as a picture in Microsoft Excel, hold down SHIFT and click Paste Picture or Paste Picture Link on the Edit menu. You can, also, create a dynamic linked text box by using the tool on the Drawing toolbar to place the object on the worksheet.
Now click to the Formula box. Type = and the click on the cell you wish to link.

Also see: Copy - Paste Methodology by Jon Peltier

The process is a little different in 2007-10. Either add the Camera tool to the Quick access toolbar, or just select the range and drop down the Paste options. Choose copy as Picture. Next pick a location and choose Paste as picture.

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Labels: Excel

<Doug Klippert@ 3:20 AM

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Monday, September 26, 2011 – Permalink –

Site Maps

Point the way

"As a Web designer and HTML builder, one of the first places I visit on a Web site is the site map. The site map shows an entire overview of the structure of the site, and more importantly, indicates how much effort was put into usability testing during the site's construction.

Learn how to chart a better site map
By Jim Kukral -Builder.com

According to Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox Usability Study on Site Maps

"27 percent of users turn to site maps when asked to learn about a site's structure. If your site map is poorly designed, you may lose 27 percent of your Web visitors. That could translate into millions of dollars of missed sales for an e-commerce site, or a massive amount of missed leads for a service company."

(A Site Map is a guide to a web site used by visitors. A Sitemap is a file used by search engines to index entries on a site. )

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Labels: Internet

<Doug Klippert@ 3:19 AM

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Sunday, September 25, 2011 – Permalink –

Lables by Merging

Demos

As part of their series of demos, Microsoft has information on creating mailing labels from a database, or mailing list.

Create labels with mail merge

Here is another entry concerning some of the fine points.

More label info

Also, if you place a graphic in the first cell, it will be duplicated in each box.

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Labels: Word

<Doug Klippert@ 3:24 AM

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Saturday, September 24, 2011 – Permalink –

Beep Codes

An IT low point

You know you're in computer doo-doo when you start looking for beep codes.

These are the sounds your machine starts to make when it cries for help.

Such as
1-2-2-3
BIOS ROM
checksum Repair or replace BIOS

Oh yea! Replace the BIOS. That'll start your week out on a high note.

Casey Tech has put together a list of beep codes for the three largest BIOS manufacturers, AMI, Award, and Phoenix that can be folded and set up as a tent card for your desk or used as a pocket guide

Beep Card

Also:

Beep Codes

What are those noises when a PC starts up? And:

Bios Central, Hardware Central - Tutorial, PC Guide.com, PC Hell.com

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Labels: Windows

<Doug Klippert@ 3:58 AM

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Friday, September 23, 2011 – Permalink –

Move that thing

Noise and motion

Microsoft has another of its easy to understand tutorials that deals with making objects move on the screen and also make sounds.

Animate text or objects
Add sound effects to an animation or hyperlink
Use sample animations in your presentation

There is also a link to a tutorial about adding sound effects to a presentation. Animation

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Labels: PowerPoint

<Doug Klippert@ 3:02 AM

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Thursday, September 22, 2011 – Permalink –

Live.com addresses

Choose your own

Tired of Hotmail, MSN, AOL, Gmail.com domain names for email addresses?

You can pick up a new address; such as MyName@Live.com.

First come etc.

Live.com email

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Labels: Outlook

<Doug Klippert@ 3:19 AM

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Wednesday, September 21, 2011 – Permalink –

Index Concordance

Order!

Creating a Table of Contents can be easy if you use Styles. Word will automatically insert a TOC when you place the insertion point and then use Insert>Reference Index and Tables and choose Table of Contents.
(2007 – Reference Tab>Table of Contents group)

An Index or Concordance can be more difficult.

In a larger document, you may want the reader to be able to locate key words. You could go through the whole document and mark each word you want included, but there is an easier way.

Make a list of the important words.
Create a two-column table in a new document.
In the first column, enter the word or phrase.
In the second column, enter the index entry
(If you need a sub-category, type the main entry followed by a colon (:) and then the sub category.)
Save the file.

When it comes time to create the Index, place the insertion point, go to Insert>Reference Index and Tables. Choose Index and then AutoMark. (2007 – Reference Tab>Index group) Browse to the location of your Index file. Word will now automatically use your list to mark the main document and insert an Index.

Also: Word for Word: An Index or a Concordance for Your Book?
Microsoft KB: How to create a table of contents and index with field codes in Word

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Labels: Word

<Doug Klippert@ 3:37 AM

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Tuesday, September 20, 2011 – Permalink –

OLAP Cubes

More dimensions than Star trek

When a company accumulates a great deal of information, it becomes un-wieldy to work with just basic Excel or Access databases.

There is a database concept called on OLAP cube (On-Line Analytical Processing).

This multidimensional collection of data can be thought of as a 3-D pivot table viewed from flat land.

MSDN:
Just What Are Cubes Anyway?
(A Painless Introduction to OLAP Technology)

OLAPReort.com:
What is OLAP

Wikipedia:
OLAP

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Labels: Access, Excel

<Doug Klippert@ 3:40 AM

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Monday, September 19, 2011 – Permalink –

Search for File Nits

Refine the questions

You can use Windows search to locate metadata information. Such as the date on the file:

date:>2/7/05<2/10/05>: Searches for a date in the Date property between the values 2/7/05 and 2/10/05, excluding the end dates.

Or all of the photos on your machine taken with a Canon:

Camera make: cameramake (cameramake:canon)

Advanced Query terms

HowToGeek - Date Search

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Labels: Windows

<Doug Klippert@ 3:33 AM

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Sunday, September 18, 2011 – Permalink –

Publisher Merges

Not just Word

You know that you can send e-mail merges using Word. Try it with Publisher.

Design a newsletter and let it rip.

Merge Publisher

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Labels: Addendum

<Doug Klippert@ 3:38 AM

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Saturday, September 17, 2011 – Permalink –

Set Field Defaults

Speed up table creation with default field settings

When you add fields to a table, Access assumes you want to use a 50/255-character Text field by default. However, you may typically use a smaller field size or you may personally use Number fields more often than Text ones.

You can avoid having to change the size and data types for new fields by setting defaults that are appropriate to your own design habits. To do so:

Choose Tools> Options from the menu bar and switch to the Tables/Queries sheet.
Select the data type you use most from the Default Field Type dropdown list.
Set the Text and Number sizes you usually want to use in the Default Field Sizes panel and
Click OK.

In Access 2007 go to Access Options>Object Designers:

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Labels: Access

<Doug Klippert@ 3:27 AM

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Friday, September 16, 2011 – Permalink –

Legacy Files from 2007

Go back

Read this article closely. If you work in a situation where you need to work with legacy (pre-2007) files, it may be handy.

If you do most of your work in 2007, I wouldn't bother.

"When you use Windows Explorer or the desktop to create a new 2007 Microsoft Office file, a new Office file is created in an XML file format (.dox or .xlsx). For example, this behavior occurs when you right-click the desktop, you point to New, and then you click Microsoft Office Word Document. By default, files that you create in the 2007 Office system are in XML file formats.

This article is about how to create legacy Office files, such as .doc files, .xls files, .ppt files, or .mdb files in the 2007 Office system. You can create legacy Office files without opening any Office applications. To do this, you must modify some settings. The modified settings will apply to all the users who log on to the computer."

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Labels: Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Word

<Doug Klippert@ 3:44 AM

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Thursday, September 15, 2011 – Permalink –

New Windows in Outlook

How to open Multiple Windows

If you want more than one window open in Outlook (for example the InBox and Calendar), Right-click on an item on the Outlook bar and select "Open in New Window" from the context menu.

Choose Tasks and Calendar or any other combination.

You can now easily cut and paste between Outlook applications
Right click an empty area on the taskbar and select how the windows should be arranged.

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Labels: Outlook

<Doug Klippert@ 3:13 AM

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Wednesday, September 14, 2011 – Permalink –

Troubleshoot

Problem solvers

If you have trouble opening a Word document, or it is not working well, try these suggestions:

FIRST
Delete all of Word's temp files.

Go to Edit>Replace
Make sure to include all of your local drives in the search and that "include subfolders" is checked.
Search for:
*.tmp
Then delete all these temp files.

Word leaves shards of temp files wherever the document file was stored. Word's temp files start with a tilde (~), so in most cases you can delete: ~*.* SECOND

Use Edit>Find to locate Normal.DOT.
Rename it (Normal.OLD) or delete it. Word will create a new copy when it restarts.

The only caveat here is be careful that you don't have important macros stored in Normal.DOT. If you rename, you can recover them. THIRD
If that does not correct the problem, try this next step:

Go to Start>Run and type:
winword.exe /a
(Note that there is a space before the /a)
Then press ENTER. This starts Word without any add-ins, global templates, or Normal.DOT.
Look in Tools>Templates and Add-ins to see if there are any files that can be un-checked.

If you need even more help, go to:
Knowledge base: How to troubleshoot problems that occur when you start Word or when you work in Word

How to troubleshoot problems that occur when you start or use Word 2007, Word 2003, or Word 2002

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Labels: Word

<Doug Klippert@ 3:19 AM

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Tuesday, September 13, 2011 – Permalink –

VBA, Named Arguments

An easier read

Use named arguments for cleaner VBA code.

Most likely, you use positional arguments when working with VBA functions. For instance, to create a message box, you probably use a statement that adheres to the following syntax:

MsgBox(prompt[, buttons] [, title] [, helpfile, context])

When you work the MsgBox function this way, the order of the arguments can't be changed.

Therefore, if you want to skip an optional argument that's between two arguments you're defining, you need to include a blank argument, such as:

MsgBox "Hello World!", , "My Message Box"

Named arguments allow you to create more descriptive code and define arguments in any order you wish. To use named arguments, simply type the argument name, followed by :=, and then the argument value.

For instance, the previous statement can be rewritten as:

MsgBox Title:="My Message Box", _
Prompt:="Hello World!"

(To find out a function's named arguments, select the function in your code and press [F1].)

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Labels: Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Word

<Doug Klippert@ 3:53 AM

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Monday, September 12, 2011 – Permalink –

Where dat site

Server locations

YouGetSignal.com provides some tools that let you find out more about a web site. Who else uses that server, for instance, and where to server is located.

Sites on Web server

A reverse IP domain check takes a domain name or IP address pointing to a web server and searches for other sites known to be hosted on that same web server.

Network location

The network location tool is a utility that approximates and displays the geophysical location of your network address on a Google Map.

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Labels: Internet

<Doug Klippert@ 3:40 AM

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Sunday, September 11, 2011 – Permalink –

Zero 0

Zero is nothing

If a zero isn't worth anything, why show it?

Here is a Microsoft tutorial about how to deal with zilch:

Display or hide all zero values on a worksheet
Use a number format to hide zero values in selected cells
Use a conditional format to hide zero values returned by a formula
Use a formula to display zeros as a blanks or dashes
Hide zero values in a PivotTable report

Hide Zeros

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Labels: Excel

<Doug Klippert@ 3:16 AM

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Saturday, September 10, 2011 – Permalink –

Calculators on the Web

Figure the vigorish

It's sometimes easier to use a preset calculator than it is to write your own in Excel.
Here's a collection of sites:

Auto Calculators
Bond Calculators
Budget Calculators
College Calculators
Credit Card Calculators
Home Calculators
Insurance - Disability Calculators
Insurance - Health Calculators
Insurance - Life Calculators
Life Expectancy Calculators
Choose-to-Save - Life Expectancy
Mutual Fund Calculators
Paycheck Planning Calculators
Retiree Health
Retirement Calculators
Roth IRA Calculators
Savings Calculators
Social Security Calculators
Social Security Administration - Estimate Your Potential Benefit
Stock Calculators
Tax Calculators

Calculators

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Labels: Addendum, Internet

<Doug Klippert@ 3:33 AM

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Friday, September 09, 2011 – Permalink –

Address Map

Display a map to an Outlook contact's address

If a contact item has an address in the United States, you can use your Internet connection and Outlook to create a map to the address. You must be connected to the Internet for this feature to work.
Open the contact item.
Next to the Address text box, click on the down arrow and select the address you want to map (Business, Home, or Other).
Then choose Actions/Display Map Of Address from the menu bar or click the Display Map Of Address button.
Your default browser opens and the map is created using Microsoft Expedia Maps.

In Outlook 2007, the Map button is on the Contact tab on the right side of the Communicate group. 2007 uses Maps.Live.com.

Outlook tips:
Outlook MVP Diane Poremsky
Customize Outlook's Map link
You can edit the registry to enable another web-based mapping service.

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Labels: Outlook

<Doug Klippert@ 3:34 AM

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Thursday, September 08, 2011 – Permalink –

Word Math

An Add-in, of course

Microsoft has a downloadable add-in for Word called Microsoft Math.

"To use the add-in, open Word 2007, type Alt-= to create a RichEdit math object, type an equation or expression, and right-click on the equation to see options for solving and graphing within Word."

Math Add-in

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Labels: Word

<Doug Klippert@ 3:53 AM

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Wednesday, September 07, 2011 – Permalink –

Indexed Sites

How many mentions

Find out how well connected your, or your favorite web site, is indexed by the major search engines:

Search Engine Saturation Check

* The second and third URL is optional.

Online Search Engine Saturation Check
provide by SEOCentro.

Search Engine saturation

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Labels: Internet

<Doug Klippert@ 3:29 AM

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Tuesday, September 06, 2011 – Permalink –

What's new in Excel 2010

Different can be good

Microsoft has a information that explains the highlights of the new features of Excel:

Improved ribbon
Access workbooks in new ways
Make fast, effective comparisons from lists of data
Sparklines
Create workbooks with more visual impact
Collaborate on workbooks in new ways

There are also other links.

What's New in Excal 2010

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Labels: Excel

<Doug Klippert@ 3:07 AM

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Monday, September 05, 2011 – Permalink –

PPT Font Size

How big should you go?

In the old days of slide shows, presenters would hold their slides out at arm's length. If they could still see the text, then it would be OK when projected.

Dave Paradi has researched the question and offers a PDF document that compares screen size, fonts, and seating distance.

For instance:

"For example, if you're using a 60 inch screen and have 32 point text on your slides, the furthest someone should be is 57 feet from the screen."

Font Size

Dave Paradi's PowerPoint Tip

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Labels: PowerPoint

<Doug Klippert@ 3:33 AM

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Sunday, September 04, 2011 – Permalink –

Merge to more than one document

Custom content

In the Data Source, include a field for the type of letter the recipient requires.

In the Main merge document, enter IF fields, such as:

{IF {MERGEFIELD "LetterType"=1} {INCLUDETEXT "C:\\Project\\Letter1" \* MERGEFORMAT} ""}
{IF {MERGEFIELD "LetterType"=2} {INCLUDETEXT "C:\\Project\\Letter2" \* MERGEFORMAT} ""}

The curly brackets { } cannot be entered from the key board. Either use Insert>Field, or Ctrl+F9.
Word uses spaces in the If..Then..Else statement.
The last two quote marks "" are "empty" , so nothing will be entered.
Notice the \\ in the path statement. A path is not needed if the Main document is in the same folder as the letters.
To see the field codes, use Alt+F9 to toggle the view on and off.

Letters 1 and 2 can have completely different texts, formats and layouts. One can be an invitation to a sale, the other can be a dunning letter. (To carry over different formatting, leave out the \* MERGEFORMAT switch)

After setting up the main document for mail merging, insert all of the fields you want to merge.

Copy the individual fields and paste them in the correct locations in Letter 1 and 2.

Go back to the main document and erase all of the text and fields EXCEPT for the IF statements.

Letters 1 and 2 do not have to be set up a merge docs, or connected to a data source. Their text will be inserted in the Main document depending on the field type.

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Labels: Word

<Doug Klippert@ 3:17 AM

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Saturday, September 03, 2011 – Permalink –

Display the current record number

Without navigation

You may want to remove the navigation buttons from an Access form but still display the current record number. Not the ID or serial number, but the record number that would appear in the navigation box.

To provide this feature, you can use VBA to place the form's CurrentRecord value in an unbound text box, and then update the value during the Current event.

To utilize this property, add an unbound text box to your form in Design view. Then, on the Event tab of the form's Property list, click the ellipsis or Build button. Choose Code Builder.

Add the following code in the Visual Basic Editor:

Private Sub Form_Current()
MyTextBox = Me.CurrentRecord
End Sub

(where MyTextBox is the name of the control that displays the record number.)

Now, when you navigate from record to record, the MyTextBox control will update automatically to reflect the current number.

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Labels: Access

<Doug Klippert@ 3:46 AM

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Friday, September 02, 2011 – Permalink –

Calendar Blanc

Empty days

Outlook allows you to print out your calendars.
If you just want to print a blank calendar over a specified period, here are the directions:

Blank calendar

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Labels: Outlook

<Doug Klippert@ 3:19 AM

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Thursday, September 01, 2011 – Permalink –

Gun Laws

How trigger happy is your state?

"Most U.S. states have failing scores when it comes to stopping criminals and other dangerous people from obtaining guns.

Two-thirds of all states score less than 20 points out of 100. Almost half of all states score 10 points or less out of 100.

The state with the strongest gun laws is California with 79 points, followed by New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maryland."

State Gun Laws

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Labels: Addendum

<Doug Klippert@ 3:31 AM

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