Archive for the ‘IT’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

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.
Print Friendly Print Get a PDF version of this webpage PDF
Share

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Advent calendar, IT | No Comments »

IT tips #5: Grow font sizes with the keyboard in Word

Monday, December 5th, 2011

This is really handy when you’ve got just a few words to put on a poster, title page or address label, and you want to get the maximum size possible, but aren’t sure what size font you can go to without splitting the text across lines or going over the page limit. This way, you can just select all the text you want to make bigger, and push it up and down by increments with the > and < keys on the keyboard, and see what works.

1. Select the text you want to make bigger

2. Hold down SHIFT+CTRL (⌃⌘ on a Mac) and press the > key.

3. Watch the text increase in size. Every press of the > key increases the font by a point size

4. To reverse the procedure, keep Shift+Control (or ⌃⌘) down, and press the < key until you get the size you want.

 

Print Friendly Print Get a PDF version of this webpage PDF
Share

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Advent calendar, IT | No Comments »

IT tips #4: Sort things in Word, even when they’re not in a table

Sunday, December 4th, 2011

Anything you put in a table in Word can be sorted – alphabetically or numerically, ascending or descending (go to Table>Sort and click on the options).

But you can also use Word to sort things which aren’t in a table, by selecting a number of paragraphs and then using Table>Sort - it will give you the option to sort by paragraphs. It will rearrange the paragraphs according to the first letters of each. It’s probably the most counter-intuitive feature of Word, because it’s patently not a table that you’re sorting.

The most obvious use for this this would be if you’re sorting items in a bibliography, where the authors need to be listed alphabetically. I’d normally use Zotero for this, but if you have a manually generated list of books, Table>Sort is a great way to organize them.

 

Print Friendly Print Get a PDF version of this webpage PDF
Share

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Advent calendar, IT | No Comments »

IT tips #3: Use Google as a calculator and more

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

Here’s three things you can do with Google that save a lot of time:

1. Use Google as a calculator

No need to get out a calculator – just use Google to do it. Type in a calculation using +, – , * (multiply, / (divide), and =. Pressing ‘return’ or ‘search’ gives you the answer.

2. Use Google as a unit/currency converter 

You can use type things like the following into Google, and it will come out with the answer:

  • 27 miles in kilometres
  • 6 stone in kilograms
  • 159 dollars in pounds

3. Use Google to find things on a particular site, or type of site 

If you type your search term followed by  site:example.com (strip off the www or http://www first)  Google will search only that site for the term. Handy when you know that you found something on a site, but can’t remember where, or you want to know what particular people have said about a topic. For example, let’s see what the ladies at mumsnet think of Jeremy Clarkson (not a lot, and they don’t hold back)

jeremy clarkson site:mumsnet.com

You can also use this to search particular domains. For example, to find out what’s on UK university sites about Jeremy Clarkson, you can type

jeremy clarkson site:ac.uk

This reveals for example that Clarkson, has an honorary doctorate in Engineering from Oxford Brookes University.

It’s very handy for checking spelling of foreign words. English-speaking sites often miss the accents off words, so if you want to know how Kylian should be spelled, type

jiri kylian site:cz

This will bring up sites about Jiří Kylián from the Czech republic only, where they are more likely to spell his name correctly. If you’re not sure what the letters are for a country, check a list of country domains.

 

Print Friendly Print Get a PDF version of this webpage PDF
Share

Tags: , ,
Posted in Advent calendar, IT | No Comments »

IT tips #2: Get rid of text-wrap when copying and pasting into Word

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

Most people know about search and replace, but fewer know that you can search & replace weird stuff like paragraph marks. This is a life-saver if you want to get rid of fixed line-breaks in text that you’ve copied and pasted into Word. It happens a lot with emails, but also with text copied from pdfs – resulting in a 25 page document that could easily be unwrapped into 4 pages.  You can’t see the paragraph marks unless you press the ‘show non-printing characters’ button (see left), but if you’ve got lines that won’t unwrap, they’re probably to blame.

 

Tip: If you’re faced with a load of annoying paragraph breaks on every line of pasted text

  1. Go to Edit>Replace (or Press Ctrl+H/Mac: ⌃⌘+H)
  2. Select the advanced options
  3. Press the ‘special’ menu button (see image below)
  4. Select ‘Paragraph Mark’
  5. This will put the sign for ^p in the ‘Find’ box
  6. Leave the ‘Replace’ box empty
  7. Select ‘replace all’

And there you are – all back into normal text again. You can of course just type ^p instead of selecting the special menu – but it’s worth seeing what else you can search for to replace.

With emails, once you’ve done this, you may still need to  get rid of the chevrons (>) that sometimes get put on the beginning of every line of quoted text.

  1. Go to Edit>Replace
  2. Type > in the ‘Find’ box
  3. In the ‘replace’ box, press Spacebar once – i.e. you’re going to replace each > with a space
  4. Select ‘replace all’

Result: one clean piece of text. Oh I nearly forgot: you’ll need something to practise on, here you are:

>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

  >The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

  >The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

  >The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

  >The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

  >The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

  >The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

  >The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

  >The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Print Friendly Print Get a PDF version of this webpage PDF
Share

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Advent calendar, IT | No Comments »

IT tips #1: Change case of letters in MS Word with a keystroke

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Select any text in Word and then press SHIFT+F3
This changes the case for you, from lower to upper or vice versa, depending on what your original sentence looks like. Pressing it again reverses the procedure, but pressing it yet again gives you title caps, for example:

Here’s an example of a sentence with normal capitalization at the beginning

<select text and press  F3 once>

HERE’S AN EXAMPLE OF A SENTENCE WITH NORMAL CAPITALIZATION AT THE BEGINNING

<select text and press F3 again>

here’s an example of a sentence with normal capitalization at the beginning

<select text and press F3 again>

Here’s An Example Of A Sentence With Normal Capitalization At The Beginning

Usage: Really handy when you’re copying and pasting text from a source which has been annoyingly typed in capitals (like addresses, for example).

NB: If you’ve got a Macbook, then press Fn+Shift+F3

Print Friendly Print Get a PDF version of this webpage PDF
Share

Tags: , ,
Posted in Advent calendar, IT | 1 Comment »

Advent calendar 2011: tips from a former Kelly Girl

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Back in the 80s, Kelly Temporary Services was called Kelly Girl, and the term ‘Kelly Girl’ was frequently a synonym for anyone employed as a temp.  Kelly were a brilliant company, who used to hold little get togethers for their temps, and they were fun to work for. It was working as a Kelly Girl paid my rent while I was struggling to make ends meet as a musician.  There were quite a few male temps at the time, which is probably one of the reasons that they took ‘girl’ out of the title.

It was during that period that I learned most of my basic computer skills, and I learned them from women – older women (i.e. women who will now be pushing 60). How things have changed. IT is now often regarded in companies as a masculine domain, and there is a myth that if you’re a) a woman and b) above a certain age, there’s some natural reason why you won’t be any good at it.

Since my site advertises itself as being about music, dance and IT, it’s now time for a bit of IT. Not nerdy stuff, but the kind of thing that saves you time to get a life and go and do something interesting.

 

Print Friendly Print Get a PDF version of this webpage PDF
Share

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Advent calendar, IT | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »