MS Office now available for iPads + More

Perhaps.. maybe.. iPads might be a little more useful now..

* Microsoft Office for iPad sets the gold standard for tablet productivity

“It took four years, but Microsoft has finally released full-featured Office apps for the iPad. As expected, the new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps are free to install but require an Office 365 subscription to unlock the full set of features. Here’s what you can expect.” Read more..

But, things ain’t all roses..

* Office for iPad is free, but it’ll cost you

“More and more large software vendors (like Microsoft and Intuit) are making their iPad apps exclusive to subscribers of their SaaS offerings. I don’t like subscription software and it’s a troubling trend.” Read more..

[it is a trend I won’t be buying into, and will not recommend. Remember the Adobe break in? But, yes, the handwriting is on the wall..]

More tech: 10 tech things we didn’t know a week ago

“Behind on the news and hungry for more? Here’s what we learned this week — including the ‘easter eggs’ in early Microsoft code, and how the U.S. will treat Bitcoin.” See slideshow

[the comments are worth a look as well.]

Sunday Beauty a day early:

Click on image to see more by this artist (reco’d)

“Amazing Sky” by Kyrre Gjerstad, courtesy of Flickr Commons

Today’s quote: “What ever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” ~ Napoleon Hill

Copyright 2007-2014 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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All we really have, in the end, are our stories.
Make yours great ones. Ones to be proud of.
And please, never forget – one person can make a difference.
Find a way to make someone’s day today.
(Best advice I ever heard? Don’t sweat the small stuff.)

How to Add Images and Color to Your Holiday Letters

Word Tricks Makes Letters Merrier (updated for ‘the Ribbon’)

It is the Holiday time of year. (Is it just me, or did 2013 pass-by rather quickly?) Each year at this time, I post this article which demonstrates a few tricks to make your Season’s Greetings letters more joyous, and your documents more visually interesting. Many of you already know the A-B-C basics of manipulating fonts and formatting, and so this will be review.. and loyal readers may remember this one..

Tip of the day: Add some festivity to your documents with fonts and color. MS Word has a lot of features and options built into it that allows for some very creative elements to be added to your correspondence, and is not at all limited to cold, “professional” documents. I’ll use Word for this demo, but you can do this in most text editors, and e-mail programs. Today I’m going to use a hypothetical holiday greeting letter to show how to add some fun. By default, Word sets the font to Calibri at 11 “points” in height. I have typed in my text, to get things started, and will demonstrate using this letter’s “opener”. As it is a header, I have “centered” the text. As you can see, this font and text does not quite convey the joy and cheer and “best wishes” I am hoping to express. In fact, this may as well say, “Memo from Giganti Corp.” Yawn! So first thing I’m going to do is ‘tweak’ the font style, and make some word bigger (louder), to express a less formal tone.  I “highlighted” Season’s Greetings, and used the Font drop-down arrow and selected a cursive font– Lucida Handwriting (explore Word’s various fonts, and find the one you like best). I set the point size to 36. I repeated the process on the second sentence, but set the type smaller.. only 18. I think you’ll agree, this is much more “friendly” than the default’s look. But this is just not Festive enough! Let’s use some color and improve things some more.  I have again “highlighted” season’s greetings to select this font, and then clicked the Font Color button on the Home tab. I then clicked on the little red box in the color-picker. Now season’s greetings is red. I want to alternate letters in green, so I hold down the Ctrl key and use my mouse to “select” every other letter. I didn’t really like the greens available on the color-picker, so I clicked on “More Colors”…. … and selected a green that contrasted nicely with the red– as the box in the lower right corner shows. This is the result of these steps. Much more jolly! But, something’s missing… Let’s add one more thing– a picture of a candy cane. I went on the Internet and found a Royalty-free graphic (though a piece of Clip Art would do just as nicely) and…  Voila! I could ‘go crazy’, and get carried away with adding things here… but I hope you will be able to see by this little demonstration — using only two of Word’s functions — that you are limited only by your own creativity, and that it’s easy to personalize and ’spice up’ your documents. (I should have matched the greens… but ran out of time.. sorry.)

*     *     *

Today’s quote: How ’bout some more Longfellow? “The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service.” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Copyright 2007-2013 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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All we really have, in the end, are our stories. Make yours great ones. Ones to be proud of.

The Week In Tech

Well, folks.. I’m kind of hard up for anything to write about today. Looking back on the week, well.. let’s review.

1) You probably have seen the ads, and know that the most amazing piece of technology (yet) is now available. I refer, of course, to the new iPad “Air”. I also refer to you to a recent ‘debate’ titled Are iPad/iPhone buyers suckers? and posit to you the idea that if a question is even being asked, the answer is ‘yes’.

2) And the Blackberry sale fell through. BlackBerry CEO Out As Takeover Bid Fails

“BlackBerry charts yet another course as Fairfax Financial invests $1 billion and former Sybase CEO John Chen takes the interim CEO reins.” Read more..

Which neither surprises nor interests me..

3) And we’ve seen these before as well:

* Zero-Day attacks hit Windows, Office, Lync

“Certain versions of Windows, Office and Microsoft Lync are being attacked in the wild via a new remote code execution vulnerability, says Microsoft in a disclosure. ” Read more..

* Limo breach impacts hundreds of thousands of high-profile clients

“The CorporateCarOnline website states in bold letters: “TRUST US; YOUR DATA IS SECURE.” Hundreds of thousands of clients beg to differ.” Read more..

Just a reminder: “breach” means “the hackers broke in”; and “Zero day” means “we don’t have an antidote just yet..”

4) And yet another IPO. Twitter is next, and I heard they’re hoping the company will be valued at $16 Billion.

Yes, with a “B”.

Which makes me think absolutely everyone has lost their freakin’ minds.

Didn’t Dot Com Bubble-Burst 1 teach a dang thing? Or, proved to even the densest in Dot Com Bubble-Burst 2?

5) I’m seeing some amazing prices on tech, and it’s not even Black Friday yet. Prices so good that last year I would’ve bought simply because it was so cheap. But this year, I don’t want anything, regardless of price. I’m tired of being spied on and shown commercials. I’m tired constantly having to ‘update’ and even more tired of having to reinstall backup images because the update broke my machine.

6) I understand people are voicing displeasure at Apple (well, those who bought the new iPad a mere 6 months ago, or so) because they’re finally figuring out Apple’s business model. But did that stop them from lining up outside the store? For the 5S? So they could get last year’s phone in teal or pink?

Bah.

I am no longer amused.

Today’s quote: “Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

Copyright 2007-2013 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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All we really have, in the end, are our stories.
Make yours great ones. Ones to be proud of.

A Word About Word #2 (Some Useful Tricks)

Folks, I have been using Microsoft’s document maker (aka “text editor”, or “word processor”) –  Word – basically since it first came out, back in the Paleozoic Age of computing (circa 1984, or so) so I was pleasantly surprised when I reviewed a Word Tips article where I actually learned something new.

Here it is (you might not know all these either..) Five tips that will increase your Word productivity

“Most of us don’t have time to discover all the ins and outs of the software we use on a daily basis. We learn on the fly, we occasionally pick up a tip or shortcut, and we grudgingly plow through the Help system when we absolutely have to.” Read more..

Also, down at the bottom, there’s: Additional resources

• 10+ lesser-known shortcuts for formatting Word text
• 10+ keyboard shortcuts for entering special characters in a Word document
• 10 things I can never find in Word 2007 (aka “That *dang* Ribbon!)
• The 10 most useful Word shortcuts
• 10 obscure Word tricks that can expedite common chores

And, yes. People still use Office (Word/Excel/Access/PowerPoint/Outlook) and yes, they “own the disc”. (Frankly, I think you always want to have the disc..)

Audience participation: Is anyone out there actually using Toucan for backup/sync? Or.. tried to? I’d appreciate some ‘feedback’, if you’d be so kind.

Today’s quote: “A man’s health can be judged by which he takes two at a time – pills or stairs.” ~ Joan Welsh

Copyright 2007-2013 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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All we really have, in the end, are our stories.
Make yours great ones. Ones to be proud of.

Friendly, Festive Documents (A How To)

Font Trick Makes Letters Merrier

It is the Holiday time of year. Each year at this time, I post this article which demonstrates some tricks to make your Season’s Greetings letters more joyous, and your documents more visually interesting. Many of you already know the A-B-C basics of manipulating fonts and formatting, and so this will be review.. and loyal readers may remember this one..

Tip of the day: Add some festivity to your documents with fonts and color. MS Word (as do most text editors) has a lot of features and options built into it that allows for some very creative elements to be added to your correspondence, and is not at all limited to cold, “professional” documents. I’ll use Word for this demo, but you can do this in most text editors, and e-mail programs.

Today I’m going to use a hypothetical holiday greeting letter to show how to add some fun. By default, Word sets the font to Times New Roman at 12 “points” in height. I have typed in my text, to get things started, and will demonstrate using this letter’s “opener”. As it is a header, I have “centered” the text.

As you can see, this font and text does not quite convey the joy and cheer and “best wishes” I am hoping to express. In fact, this may as well say, “Memo from Giganti Corp.” Yawn! So first thing I’m going to do is ‘tweak’ the font style, and make some word bigger (louder), to express a less formal tone.

I “highlighted” Season’s Greetings, and used the Font drop-down arrow and selected a cursive font– Lucida Handwriting (explore Words various fonts, and find the one you like best). I set the point size to 36. I repeated the process on the second sentence, but set the type smaller.. only 18. I think you’ll agree, this is much more “friendly” than the default’s look. But this is just not Festive enough! Let’s use some color and improve things some more.

I have again “highlighted” season’s greetings to select this font, and then clicked the Font Color button on the Formatting toolbar (If this is not showing, click here to read how to customize your toolbars). I then clicked on the little red box in the color-picker. Now season’s greetings is red. I want to alternate letters in green, so I hold down the Ctrl key and use my mouse to “select” every other letter.

I didn’t really like the greens available on the color-picker, so I clicked on “More Colors”….

… and selected a green that contrasted nicely with the red– as the box in the lower right corner shows. This is the result of these steps.

Much more jolly! But, something’s missing…

Let’s add one more thing– a picture of a candy cane. I went on the Internet and found a Royalty-free graphic (though a piece of Clip Art would do just as nicely) and…

Voila!I could ‘go crazy’, and get carried away with adding things here… but I hope you will be able to see by this little demonstration — using only two of Word’s functions — that you are limited only by your own creativity, and that it’s easy to personalize and ’spice up’ your documents.

Like free software? Click here to see my article telling of three giveaways (not contests – giveaways!)

Copyright 2007-2011 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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Syncing Your Devices – Calendars, Email, Contacts, oh my!

My job as a support and repair technician is evolving — which is only natural, as tech itself is evolving. At an exponential rate.

Years ago, my job consisted mainly of trying to cure non-booting Windows installations (remember “Error: ntldr.exe is missing or corrupt”?), getting a recalcitrant printer to ‘install’, crawling in attics and under houses “pulling” Ethernet cable, and removing the occasional virus.

Around 2007, the explosion of cybercrime forced me to become a virus removal specialist, and accounted for the majority of my hires. Affordable Wireless G networking gear pretty much ended my need for coveralls and flashlights, and I had to learn about (and master) RF ‘spectrum’, interference, and wireless security. Plug and Play’s finally maturing to functionality greatly reduced my printer install calls; but now there was “home entertainment centers” (with Dolby Surround Sound!) and “nanny cams” to install.

Today, the call coming into my shop – it seems – has a 50/50 shot of either being a nasty virus, or something like “I just synced my iPhone, and now I have three copies of each of my Contacts.” (or, “I just synced my iPhone, and now my Inbox is empty!“) We are transitioning to “cloud computing” – like it or not – and “mobile computing”.

People used to know better than to mix Apples and Windows (for one thing, it didn’t work), but today.. well most people seem to have at least one iGadget, maybe an Android phone (perhaps a BlackBerry), and their PC at home is Windows. And they expect them all to play together in some Utopian sense of “I paid for it, it should work.” Like.. the folks at Apple and the folks up in Redmond like each other, and go on picnics together.. and join hands and sing kumbaya, and the folks at Google just show up and join in. One big happy family. (I just made myself “lol”.)

“People are no longer tied to any specific location or device as they roam about getting work done on laptops, tablets, or even smartphones. The challenge is to keep everything synced so you can access the same data from each of those platforms.“

Well, here’s the real truth: it is not in Apple’s or Microsoft’s best interest to play well together, and in fact it profits them to try to “lock you into’ their products. Google? Yeah, it profits them to play nicely (and move you into the cloud) as their purpose is -> they want to learn every-single-thing they can about us, and then show us ads we don’t want to see.
Yippee.

Okay. So it’s 2011, and you want to keep your Outlook, iPad, and Blackberry all in “sync”, and you want it so, when you enter a new phone number for a Contact on one device, the Contact ‘merges’ seamlessly on your other devices with no errors, duplications, and do it in real time.
Good luck with that.

This is fledgling technology (learning to crawl), and everyone under the sun is selling some product which they claim can do this. But know this, (and I quote) “No perfect, seamless solution exists yet”.
Of course it doesn’t: this is all too new. This stuff isn’t even to version 1.0 yet, it sure seems to me. And there’s other agendas and cross-purposes in play as well (think “sales”).

But there are methods. Imperfect methods. But.. better than none, right?

For Outlook user who want syncing with iPads and/or iPhones, my (admittedly limited) experiences tell me you have two routes, really. And probably the best one is a $100/yr MobileMe account. Which, guess what? Is now closed for new sign ups (as of today?)(again, I made myself ‘lol’). But, coming this Fall, if you can wait that long, there will be a new version – called “iCloud“. Which probably will work.. and probably will stick around longer than MobileMe did… The other route is to ‘go Google’.. basically installing things so you can use Google’s (“cloud”) servers and services as your ‘middleman’. (So they can learn all your habits..)

What I suggest – if this topic is relevant to you – is you read this great PC World article: How to Keep Your Data in Sync Across Platforms and Devices

“Keeping your contacts, calendars, and other data synced across all your mobile devices and PC platforms isn’t as difficult as it seems.“

One thing about tech.. you have to constantly keep learning.. it isn’t sitting still! (TCP/IP v6 is here..)

Today’s (other) reading reco: Here is a Very Nice and Useful Firefox Add-On and Chrome Extension That Will Save You Paper

“Here is a nice Firefox add-on and Chrome extension, called iWeb2X,  that is engineered to convert a web page to a printer friendly PDF, image snapshot, or high resolution wallpaper. What sets this iWeb2X apart from the other PDF utilities out there is that no sign-up account is required and you get the following features: […]”

Today’s quote: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are!” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Copyright 2007-2011 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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Tip: Change Office’s AutoRecover Location

Make Document AutoRecovery More Functional

The AutoRecover feature in Microsoft Office can truly be a lifesaver when you are working on a document and the program (or system) crashes. However, by default, the AutoRecover files are always saved to a difficult – to – find folder. By telling Office to Save those files to a location of your choosing, you will know right where to find them should the worst happen, and you need them.
(Also, it’s a good idea to ‘tweak’ the frequency it makes its ‘snapshots’ of your work in progress.)

The default locations are:

• Vista/Win 7 = c:\Users\*username*\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\
• Windows XP = c:\Documents and Settings\*username*\Application Data\Microsoft\

Here’s the How To:

The first thing we need to do is create (or choose) a location. I create a “recovery” folder inside my “Documents” folder. (I recommend creating the location, to avoid cluttering up existing places with autosaves.)

• Click the Start button, and then Documents
• In a blank (white) area of the Documents window, right – click, and choose New and then Folder
• A new folder will appear, and the cursor will be blinking in the name rectangle. Change it to (aka “name it”) OfficeRecovery (or something similar)

Now we need to set Office’s AutoRecovery behavior:

1) Open any Office program — Word, Excel, PowerPoint…

2) Click on File, and then go down the list and click Options.

3) In the left-hand column, click on Save.

4) In the new window that opens:

● Change the “Save AutoRecover information every ____ minutes” from the default 10 to something a little more helpful. I prefer 3 minutes, but one or two minutes (if you’re a fast typer) may be a good choice too.

● Change the “AutoRecover file location:” to point to the folder we just created.

1. Click the Browse button
2. In the left column, click Documents, and then in the right pane, locate and double-click on your recovery folder
3. Click OK

● Click OK

That’s it. You’re done. Now, in the event of a power failure, computer crash, or whatnot, you actually may be able to easily recover your lost work. But please note: AutoRecover or AutoSave does not replace the Save command. You should use the Save command to save your document at regular intervals and when you finish working on it.

Today’s quote: “Sometimes the best way to learn from your mistakes is to carry them with you.”

Copyright 2007-2011 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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