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IT tips #12: Select text in Word as a graphic block

Monday, December 12th, 2011

Let’s say you’ve copied and pasted an enormous block of text from a document in such a way that you end up with bullet points or numbered lists or a column of data that you don’t want. For example, you might need to turn a manually entered numbered list into an automatic one, or remove the numbering all together.  To go through manually and delete them is slow and painful, particularly when you’ve got a list of nearly 100 items.  You can’t select just the numbers without selecting the rest of the paragraph.

But oh yes you can. In Word, you can in fact select an area of the screen graphically by holding down the ALT key while you select with the mouse, as in the example below  (the blue area has been selected this way).

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IT tips #11: Use dummy text to help you write

Sunday, December 11th, 2011

This much I know – it’s much harder to write an article of 250 words than one of 2,500.  The word count of articles I’ve written for Dance Gazette over the last 12 years has gone from 1750, to 1,000, 750, to 500, to 400, and now 250, and it gets more difficult with every reduction.

What I do now for anything under 1500 words is to create a dummy article so that I can see how it’s going to look on the page, and decide how to arrange the paragraphs – a short opener, thick middle and brief conclusion? Five equal paragraphs? 4 of increasing size plus a one line ending? You get the idea.

For long articles, I use the Lorem ipsum generator (lorem ipsum are the first two words of standard dummy text used in publishing). If it’s just a mini task in Word (‘write no more than 50 words of description’) I use Word’s in-built dummy-text generator, one of my favourite party-tricks

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IT tips #10: Customise keyboard shortcuts to enter weird characters in Word

Saturday, December 10th, 2011

If there’s an off-beat symbol that you have to put in to documents regularly (in my case, it’s the  P in a circle that means ‘phonographic copyright’) you can cut out several steps by assigning the symbol to a keyboard shortcut. Here’s how to do it in Word for Mac 2008, but the process is fairly similar in other versions and platforms. Instructions below, or watch the video (make it full screen so you can see it properly).

  1. Go to Tools>Customize keyboard…
  2. From the menu that appears, choose ‘Insert‘ on the left, and then ‘symbol‘ on the right (NB: Don’t choose ‘InsertSymbol’)
  3. When the character sets appear, choose the character set that contains the symbol you need (in my case, it’s Webdings)
  4. Pick the character that you need
  5. Press OK
  6. Place the cursor in the ‘Press new keyboard shortcut‘ field
  7. Now press any combination of keys – in my case, I pressed ctrl+alt+command+P (all three keys on the left of the space bar + the letter P, because it’s easy to remember)
  8. Press ‘Assign‘ (don’t forget this step, otherwise it won’t work)
  9. Press ‘OK”
  10. Try it out: in your Word document, press the key combination that you assigned to the special character, and watch it appear!

 

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IT tips #9: Download Youtube videos as MP4/FLV files

Friday, December 9th, 2011

There are many, many ways of doing this, but Download YouTube Videos as MP4  is one of the simplest and most reliable plugins I’ve ever used. I use it for embedding video clips in PowerPoint when I’m lecturing, because if you’ve got a YouTube clip that you really want to show someone else

  • there’s a risk that it might have been taken off-line by the time you go to show it again
  • if the internet connection fails or is slow, you can’t show it at all
  • clips load much quicker when they’re already on your local computer rather than being streamed off the web

Once you’ve installed the script, it  adds a little menu item on every  YouTube  page right under the video that gives you the option to download it  as MP4 or FLV.

Just a word of warning though – don’t press any of the green ‘download’ buttons:  to install the script, just go to the top right hand side of the page and press ‘Install’ (see below) – all the ‘download now’ buttons refer to other things sitting as ads on the page, and are nothing to to with the script.

If you use it in Firefox you need to install Greasemonkey first, but it works straightaway as a plug-in in Chrome. See directions on the page for other browsers.

By the way, I know that downloading YouTube clips and storing them is probably illegal and violates all kinds of copyright laws, but I take the view that when I do it, I’m using the clip temporarily in an educational  context, and I wouldn’t upload the video again to another site, or distribute it on a CD or DVD.

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IT tips #8: How to embed a Youtube clip in a post

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

I’m going to explain this in relation to WordPress, but the principle is broadly the same in several other contexts. It’s very straightforward, but it’s the part in point 7 below that is the thing that you really need to know to make it work.

  1. Go to the YouTube page where your favourite clip is
  2. Press the ‘share’ button
  3. Press the ‘embed’ button [note - some clips don't allow embedding, and this is the point at which you'll find out]
  4. Pick a frame-size from the four different sizes shown.  For embedding in a web-post like this, I usually pick a small one so that it fits within post size, but you can always go back and alter it later.
  5. For safety, pick ‘Use old embed code’ – it usually works with anything
  6. Now click in the box with the blue highlighted code, select all of it and copy it.
  7. Go to the place where you want to embed the video, and select ‘HTML’ or ‘Code’ (sometimes shown as < > ona tool bar). In WordPress it looks like the tabs on the left – press the ‘HTML’ tab and it will stop being greyed-out.  Find the end of the HTML code, and paste in the code from Youtube
  8. Press Visual again – and you’ll see a shaded box where the YouTube clip will be once you’ve saved and uploaded.
  9. If you’ve made a mistake about the size, go back to YouTube and select a different frame-size, and re-select and copy the code from the code box.
  10. Here’s a screen shot of what the ‘embed’ part of Youtube looks like:

And here’s the result:

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IT Tips #7: use PureText to strip off unwanted formatting

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

Yet another copy-and-paste trick this: if you copy and paste text from a website, the likelihood is that it’s got all kinds of fancy text decoration, tables round it, different font sizes and so on, that make it a real mess to unpick if you want to use the text alone.

Steve Miller’s PureText is a free, tiny little program that sits on your PC in the background so that when you want to copy and paste something with all the crap stripped off it, you select and copy the text in question, press the PT icon in the task bar to strip off all the crap before you press paste.

Mac Users: not quite so simple, and there are several alternatives, but this is the one I use: install Quicksilver, then use this Quicksilver Trick (scroll down to the screenshot of Quicksilver to cut to the chase) to automatically invoke format-stripping before you paste.

Thanks to Bruce from Ballet.co who shared the PureText tip years ago – I’ve used it every week since.

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IT tips #6: Print just a portion of a PDF file

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

For the first time ever in the eight and half-year history of my blog, I have a guest blogger! Thank you to David Leonard of Dance Books  for contributing today’s tip. It was precisely this problem that prompted a colleague of mine to say ‘You should write this stuff down’.  It’s the solution to a problem that is an almost daily occurrence annoyance in my job, where we deal with non-standard things like tri-fold CD inlay booklets that won’t print on A4, or a sheet of photos where we need to select one and print it out. David writes: 

If you’ve ever wanted to print just a portion of a PDF file from Adobe Reader, this is how you can do it. It also allows you to enlarge the selected area to fill the entire page, if desired. This is known to work in Adobe Reader 6.0 and higher, although it may work in older versions as well.

Difficulty: Easy
Time Required: 1 minute

Here’s How:

  1. Find the “Snapshot Tool” on the Basic toolbar and select it.
  2. Drag a box around the area you want to print. A message will alert you that the selection has been copied to the clipboard. Click OK and you will see a dashed line around the area you just selected.
  3. Click Print.
  4. In the print dialog, set the print rage to “Selected graphic.”
  5. If you want to print the selection at its intended size, set Page Scaling to “None.”
  6. If you want the selection to fill the paper, set the page scaling to “Fit to paper.” You may need to check the “Auto-Rotate and Center” check box to maximize paper usage.
  7. When you are satisfied with the preview, click OK to print the document.
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