“If you get the dirty end of the stick, sharpen it and turn it into a useful tool” Colin Powell

To begin again…
August is coming and teachers are starting to think of the coming year. Students are trying to avoid thinking at all. I know have mentioned this before but I think it needs to be restated. Google, you may have heard of it, is really useful. I recommend trying some of the other free services that Google has to offer. Now I am going to use a teacher slant with this but it could be used for any possible business or project. First off register for a Google service because once you do you will have access to all the rest of the services right away. It is free and quick. Gmail is just the tip of the Googleverse. Gmail is their version of email. One of the reasons I recommend using it is that it is searchable just like Google. This means if a student emails you during the year you can find it fairly easily. Also it does have other abilities like IM (chatting with students built directly into it) or the ability to take all emails from a specific conversation and creating a dialogue out of them instead of scattered emails through out the system. Google calendar allows for sharing of schedules and appointments throughout a group or organization. Also these can be saved to a website to make it viewable to all without registering. Google Docs and Sites are the two most underused by teachers. These together are so easy to use and useful it is unbelievable. Docs is an online Microsoft Office like set of tools. All you do is sign in and you have something that looks like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This alone is good but once you think of the ability to share it between others it makes it supreme. It can be viewed or editable by others at the touch of a button. Finally Google Sites is the culmination of all of these. It is creatable webpage that you can use to communicate info with groups of all sorts. As an example lets say a teacher has a book group. They can post all the info about the book they are going to read and then add photos and music from where the book is set. The great thing is that it requires no real HTML ability. If you can use Microsoft Word then you can easily use Sites. Now I know I am being very general about this post but that is what it is supposed to be. I recommend checking all the sites above and see if they fit a use. Give it a try.

"I'm now a Doctor of Letters. Most of them Fs and Bs." Billy Connolly

Just a quick shortcut today. Many times I am in the thick of my work and it takes a while for me to notice that I have just typed everything with caps lock on. So now all my words are capitalized. The easy fix is to highlight the problem text and then hold the CTRL and Shift keys and then press the letter A. This will drop it down to lower case. If I do it again it will return to upper case. It is quick and easy so why not give it a try.

“Orange is the happiest color.” Frank Sinatra

When I teach Excel charts and graphs I spend a fair amount of time on the design work of a graph or a chart. Putting together a chart is easy but making it look good and appealing is very difficult. I always stress the importance of color which I find lacking in many instructional books. Color is always considered, in Excel, as an extra. As far as I am concerned this is insane! If you are creating a chart then you are most likely going to use it to convince someone of something like vote for my candidate or invest in your business. Choosing just any color can prove hazardous so I always mention the psychology of color. An example I always use is the color of the yield signs on highways are called safety yellow. That color is shown to make people nervous and anxious. If you use this in a chart to get someone to give money to your business you may have just screwed it up. You might as well use it to your advantage because it is already used in places like the grocery store to convince you to buy more or stay longer. I found three good sites that can give you an inkling of what color means. Give this one a try and see if it improves some of your work.

• Wikipedia colors and their meanings
• About: Color Psychology
• InfoPlease: Color Psychology

“Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.” Daniel J. Boorstin

A couple notes that are not big enough for a full post. Hope you enjoy this little list.

• Providence Public Library has a bunch of other blogs now, Check them out.
  
• iGoogle has a whole bunch of new themes, so check those out.
  
• Beware of Excel documents you are not familiar with. There are some malicious documents floating around the net so just be a bit more careful what you open.
  
• New pictures of the planet Mercury just out.
  
• Google images has a face recognition feature, but it is not always an option. Be on the lookout for it.
  
• Bill gates Steps down video...funny stuff
  
• Steve Jobs steps up to the keynote, Watch the whole 90 minute keynote condensed down to 60 seconds
• Beware of the some supposed Mac software called MacSweeper. It is a type of spyware that says it cleans and repairs your Mac.
  
• New way around those phone systems you are forced to call for help. They are programmed to detect "naughty" words. So swear away when they have prompts and you just may get right to a human.

“I wonder if illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup?'” Jerry Seinfeld

So you have a database with many columns full info and now all you have to do to finish it is alphabetize. Thankfully your friend told you about these useful little buttons on the standard toolbar that look like an A to Z going up or down. You choose one of those buttons and suddenly TERROR! One column is organized and the others are not. Your database is ruined. Those two buttons have destroyed more peoples work then I can think of. Instead use the sort feature. First click in the data menu at the top and then click sort. Here is where real organizing of data can take place. Now if you have a heading row you will usually see one of the names here. However if not you will see column A. Either way choose the column you want to organize. You can choose if you want to organize by ascending or descending. The nice thing here is that you can select up to three separate areas to organize. As an example I organize a sheet will all my classes but I first sort it by date then by time. Using this way will sort all the data together. I should tell you that you may see a warning if you had selected one column or row ahead of time. You want to choose to expand the selection so it will affect the entire database. So when you have some alphabetizing to get done give this a try and stop listening to that friend.

“Brain cells create ideas. Stress kills brain cells. Stress is not a good idea.” Frederick Saunders

A question I get a lot is how does one make a banner out of a bunch of cells across the screen. There is one button that makes this so easy that it is just a two step process. First highlight or select the cells or boxes that you want to make into a single cell then go to the formatting toolbar and choose Merge and Center. It is usually near the alignment buttons. It looks like a confused lower case a. Once you click this it will collapse all the selected cells into one. This can be done vertically and diagonally as well. Also if you had text in one of the boxes it will now be centered. Be careful if you have text in multiple boxes that you wish to merge. It will tell you cannot do it. Just choose a blank set of cells or cut and paste all there data out of there. If you to rearrange your space give this one a try.

“We relax at the ranch, which if not heaven itself, probably has the same zip code.” Ronald Reagan

Yesterday I received a letter addressed with a zip code that looked like this ‘02906. So what is the big deal you ask? Well the tiny little apostrophe tells me two things. Most likely this person used mail merge to print all the addresses on labels. The second thing is that they do not know about a nice formatting feature built into Excel. The problem with spreadsheet programs is that they do not understand the difference between a basic number and a zip code. So when you type in a zip it drops the zero. Confused? Let’s say you are payed $0100.00. We normally drop a zero on the left hand of a number that is not preceded by a number meaning we change $0100.00. to $100.00. Many people see this and add the apostrophe to stop it from changing. This solves the problem to a degree but every zip now has an extra symbol in it. The easy way to fix this is to highlight the data or a whole column of zip codes and then click on the format menu and choose cells. From the list of categories you should choose special. Once you do you will see zip code and zip code plus four. I usually choose just zip code and then hit OK. This will add in all the missing zeros. You can do this before or after you put them in. So if you are planning on keeping track of addresses in Excel give this one a try.

"Mutation: it is the key to our evolution." Professor Xavier founder of the X-Men

I wanted to add to yesterdays post. I posted about changing the format of the document type when you save you r documents. I started wondering if there is another way. What I mean is that I will forget to change the format and do it haphazardly. So there must be a way to make this easier and there is. Open up Word 2007 and go to the save as area. Once there click on the Tools button at the bottom and click on saving options. Once there you can change the preferences for saving all the time. Change from Word Document to saving in Word 97-2003 document. The click OK and from now on it will always do this. I am unsure if I would recommend this a year and half later but for today I want to make my word processing experience easier. Give it a try.

“Anything that is unexpected is the X-factor.” Dante Hall

To save or not to save is not really the question when it comes to Microsoft Office 2007. The real question is how should I save? The problem is that the newest version of Office has a new format when it saves. It used to save a resume, lets say, in .DOC format. Now it is automatically saved in .DOCX so that it can use the XML technology. Now I am sure it does add more functionality to your resume, like tags, but the problem is that older versions cannot open up the new format. Meaning, if you send your resume.docx to me and I have a perfectly good version of Office 2002 then I cannot open it. This is causing problems within offices where they have updated some machines and not others. The fix is an easy one. When you save as make sure you change the type to save as Word 97-2003 document. This will make it easy to communicate with everyone else who is using an older version. Give it a try until we all catch up.