Friday, June 19, 2009

Placing pics in Word

Word is not the easiest tool when it comes to designing pages. Some things that are simple operations in any page layout program are a nightmare to try and do in Word. Fortunately, one operation that has been improved in Word 2007 is the handling of images. If you want to place a photograph, for instance, in a Word document, from the Insert menu click on "Picture", and then choose from the dialogue box that opens. When you okay the choice, Word automatically inserts it wherever you had your text cursor in the document, and if the cursor is in the middle of a line, it will break the text at that point to accommodate the image. The result is something akin to a skyscraper in a treeless landscape. But there is much you can do to improve things. When the image is imported, you will see a dotted blue line around it, which means it is selected. And the menu bar will have changed to Format. One of the most important options there is Text Wrapping, and you have many possibilities to choose from. For simple work, I suggest "Square", which allows you to drag the image around anywhere on the page, and the text will wrap around it. If you click and drag on a corner of the image, you can resize it. I also suggest playing around with the Edit Wrap Points and More Layout Options, which give a lot more control over how the image the text interact with each other.
Embedded images: One word of caution - when Word imports an image, by default it embeds it in the document. This means that all the image information is stored within the document. It has the advantage that when you send the document to another person, you don't need to send the image as well. The disadantage is that if you try to extract and save the image as a separate item, there is a massive loss of quality. And the file size of the Word document increases by the size of the image - so it takes only a few images to quickly bloat the size of the Word document to massive amounts, certainly more than most email systems will comfortably handle. There are some alternatives, which Microsoft cleverly hides until you click on a tiny triangle next to the "Insert" button at the bottom right of the dialogue box when you choose a picture to insert. Here is some help on what the alternatives mean.

Amazing online photo editing tool

I have just come across a website called Aviary. Aviary makes web-based image editing tools, which allow you to do Photoshop-type work on an image just using your internet browser. Some of the options they offer are jaw-droppingly good, and way ahead of even Photoshop. The effects editor in particular is outstanding. If you are daunted by the idea of coming to grips with such complexity, they have done their best to make the process very intuitive, and a series of well-designed video tutorials walk you through everything you need to know. The company also recently launched a Firefox add-on that lets you right-click on any image in your web browser to edit it with Aviary. And all this for free!!! I don't know how they do it, but this site is going straight into my Favourites. In addition, it's believed that Aviary will soon be launching a suite of online audio production tools. I can't wait.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Recover deleted files

It's the stuff to rival your worst nightmares. You send a file to the Recycle/Trash bin, empty the bin, and suddenly realise you have just deleted a vital document. Fortunately, help is at hand. There are numerous programs that can recover these files, and most often they work very well. The reason they can recover files is because a deleted file is not actually wiped from your computer's hard drive immediately. All you have done is give the computer permission to use that space when it runs out of room elsewhere. So if you have not done any work in the meantime, the chances are probably better than 99% you can get the file back. The caveat is that you should attempt recovery as soon as you realise your mistake. Recuva, a free utility, offers to restore files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. "It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!"
Incidentally, if you have merely sent a file to Recycle/Trash and not emptied the bin, you don't need a recovery utility at all. Open the bin, locate and select the file, then right-click and choose "restore". That will return the file to the place from whence it came.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Archiving web pages

One of the advantages of Internet Explorer is its ability to save/archive a web page as a single archive file (to which it gives the extension .mht), a feature it has had from the early days. To do this, you simply choose File/Save As, and then the option "Web archive, single file". You can view the archived pages at any time, not necessarily when connected to the internet. If you do much research work on the internet, this archive format is a real boon.
Firefox does not have this feature built in - you get only the options to save a page as a text file (with images missing), or as a "Web page, complete". If you choose the latter, images and other bits and pieces from the page are stored in a new folder the browser automatically creates. However, an archive add-on is available which does the same job as Internet Explorer, and which appears to be able to store multiple pages in the same archive (I haven't tried this latter feature yet).

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

If Bill Gates ran the auto industry

The following has been going the rounds for years, but it's worth recycling. (PS: It's a joke that has taken on the quality of urban myth, as the folk at Snopes explain.)
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX) Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry as, we would all be driving 25.00 dollars cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever, your cash would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue.4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to restart the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the syun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive, but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This car has performed An Illegal Operation."
7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure" before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed ahold of the radio attenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn on the engine.
On the theme of Microsoft jokes, this is my second favourite:
Q: How many Microsoft technicians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. They redefine darkness as the industry standard.

Converting web documents to pdf

A couple of weeks ago I was searching for a way to turn web documents I had authored in Dreamweaver into pdf files. The answer is actually fairly simple.
Microsoft Word can open any web (html) document. The results may not display exactly as in the original, but a little tweaking will probably fix that. Then it is a simple matter to turn the Word document into a pdf, using the "Save As..." command. You will need to install the pdf add-in from Microsoft if you do not already have it, but it is a free download.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Solve Word 2003-2007 incompatibilities

Microsoft changed Word's format with version 2007. Word documents created with Office 2007 are given the file extension .docx, which is a different standard from the .doc format of all previous versions. (At least the suffix does you a clue that you are dealing with two different animals.) The downside is that if you have only Word 2003 or earlier - and I have Word 2000 still chugging along happily on one machine - you cannot open the new format. Fortunately, there are several solutions.
1. If you're using Word 2007, you can still save your files as .doc files so that anyone can read them. To save an individual file this way, in the Save As dialog box's 'Save as type' pull-down menu, select Word 97-2003 Document. You can also set that format as your default. Click the Office logo in the top-left corner of the Word screen, then select Word Options (bottom right of the dialogue box that pops up). In left pane, click Save. In right pane, for 'Save files in this format,' select Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc). Click OK.
2. If you're using Word 2000, 2002, or 2003, you can download and install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. The downloads are free.
3. Another option is to use OpenOffice.org as your word processor. Version 3 recently released can open .docx files quite happily. If you have only an earlier version (hey, it's a free download), you can use the updated Word Viewer from the Microsoft website and use it to open the .docx document. This document can then be copied and pasted into OpenOffice. Another possibility is to use the free online service called docx-converter which converts documents into the format readable by OpenOffice.
I should note in passing that OpenOffice's default format is called "open doc", which saves files with the extension .odt. This format can be read by virtually every word processor, even including Word!