Better Hash Tags with Tagal.us

While hash tags have been around on Twitter for ages (at least ages in Twitter time!), they’re a little bit difficult to manage. Hash tags are like this #psw and they're used as a way to tag a post with its contents. This one, #psw is for Photoshop World – using this in our Tweets lets us share messages during the conference. Problem is to find the hashtag tweets. You can do it in Twitter search but it's cumbersome to say the least.

Enter Tagal.us which gives you an interface for setting up hash tags and monitoring the tag content. The idea is that someone registers a tag at Tagal.us for an upcoming event. So there's already one #PSW set up for Photoshop World. Once the hash tag has been created anyone can go to the Tagal.us site using the tag as part of the URL, for example http://tagal.us/tag/psw and view the tweets that mention this tag.

Even if you’re not following someone you’ll still see them in the list and see their tweets. This is a great way to monitor activity at a tradeshow or other event where there is lots of activity in a short period of time. You can find everything relating to the hash tag you're interested in at one easy to find (and bookmark) location.

Calculating printer costs

If you own an inkjet printer it won't be long before you realise that the cost of the printer is far less than the cost of consumables for it.

I have a great HP printer which has separate colour cartridges for 5 colours and black so I only change cartridges when I run out of a colour - it's more cost effective than replacing a composite cartridge which has multiple inks in it because you only replace a colour when you're out of it.

However, I'm always curious about what ink costs and how much my printer really costs to run. I found, courtesy of OfficeWatch.com this calculator from the American Consumer site which helps you calculate what your printer costs. You type in how many pages in black and white, colour and photos you print a week and it calculates the cost of your printer over 3, 5 and 7 years. It's an eye opener!

Solving printing problems in Excel

I've seen adults brought almost to tears over printing worksheets. Big worksheets consume lots of paper and when things go wrong they do so in a spectacularly wasteful way. Sometimes the best you can do is hit the printer Off switch to at least achieve a short term solution to the problem. A longer term solution is to understand how you can control what is printed and that's what I'll cover this month. I'll look at the basics of printing a worksheet and then explore some more advanced options which offer better control over your printouts.

Troubleshooting problems
When you choose File > Print or click the Print button in Excel, the program determines what to print and does so. By default it prints everything on the currently active sheet. So, if you have a small set of data in the top corner of the worksheet and have accidentally typed something into a cell way below this (even if it is just a single space), you'll get your data and everything else between this and the one cell with the mistaken entry printed. It could be pages and pages of blank paper – or lined paper if you have gridlines enabled and it's perilously hard to track what went wrong.

You can see ahead of time that you're about to have problems if you use the Print Preview tool. When the Next button is visible there are more pages to print than the one you can see. Of course, you should take care to never place a space in a cell. If you need to remove the cell's contents, click in the cell and press Delete never use the spacebar.

If you can't find the problem cell to delete it, you can try to fix the problem by deleting all the rows below your data and all the columns to the right of it and try again. In the long term this will avoid the problem happening when you print the workbook again next time. If this is a one off worksheet, you can select the area to print before printing it. Drag over the area to print and choose File > Print (don't click the Print button on the toolbar as it prints the entire sheet regardless of what is selected). When the Print dialog appears, click Selection so only the selection will be printed.

Adding Page Breaks
To preview the page breaks on the worksheet to see where the data will be broken up into individual pages, choose View > Page Break View. Lines will appear on the screen indicating where the page breaks are. You can change these by adding your own manual page breaks but you have to do this inside the current page breaks – for example you can add a break inside a page but you can't configure a page to be longer or wider using this method.

To add a manual page break, click to select the entire column or row where the break should appear and choose Insert > Page Break – the page break will be added to the immediate left of this column or immediately above the row. You can also click a cell and choose Insert > Page Break and a page break will be added above and to the left of that cell. When in Page Break View, not only are page breaks visible on the screen, you can also move them by dragging on them with your mouse.



Headings on all worksheet pages
Another issue when printing is that as soon as a sheet prints on more than one sheet of paper, the column headings or row headings appear on the first page but won't appear on the other pages. This makes the data on the second and subsequent pages almost impossible to understand unless they're taped together to form a single large sheet.

To avoid this, configure Excel to print column and row headings on every page of your printout. Choose File > Page Setup > Sheet tab and click in the 'Rows to repeat at top' box – type the row letters in the form $1:$1 (to print only the first row) or $1:$2 for the second etc.. If preferred, you can click the Collapse Dialog button to hide the dialog while you select the rows to use. Likewise you can set the columns that contain the row titles – generally these are in column A and you specify it in the 'Columns to repeat at left' box with an entry like $A:$A to use just the first column or $A:$B for the first two, etc..

More printing controls
When printing a worksheet that is wider than it is tall, you can print onto paper in landscape orientation to take advantage of the dimensions of the paper. To do this, choose File > Page Setup > Page tab and select Landscape. At the same time, make sure you’ve selected Letter or A4 paper depending on what you're using as each has different dimensions.

Shrink to fit
When you have a worksheet that is just too large to print on a single piece of paper you can shrink it to fit on a single sheet by choosing File > Page Setup > Print tab and click the 'Fit to 1 page(s) wide by 1 page tall' option and it will be reduced to fit on a single sheet.

If your data is very long and you want to print it one page wide but on many pages long you can use the same option – in this case set it so it reads 'Fit to 1 page(s) wide' and delete the entry in the second box – Excel will constrain the width to a single page but print on as many sheets as are needed length-wise.

The same can be done for a worksheet that is wider than it is tall – remove the entry from the first box so it reads 'Fit to page(s) wide by 1 page tall'. Of course, you can also set the value to 2 pages wide or tall or more as required.

When a worksheet will print over multiple sheets in both directions the order in which the sheets are printed may be important. You have two choices – you can have Excel print down the left side of the worksheet first and then across to the next series of pages to the right or you can have it print the width of the worksheet first then the pages below this. This order can be controlled using File > Page Setup > Sheet tab – and select either 'Down, then over' (the default) or 'Over, then down'.

15 ways to size a Tweet to 140 characters

If you're a twitterer you know Twitter gives you only 140 characters to get your message across. So you have to be short and sweet - but not so much so that no one gets your message.

Lance Ulanoff editor of PC Mag (an organisation I have had a long and very happy association with as a Contributing Editor to the mag), has a great post 14 Tricks for making 140 character Tweets.. to which I am going to add my 15th!

What are you trying to say?
Focus on what you are trying to say first and add descriptive extras later. I do a lot of posts mentioning cool free Photoshop brushes so I put Free Photoshop brushes first in my post as that's the most important part. Then I briefly describe the set so folks know if it might be of interest to them and finally I'll add a tinyurl link.

I know there are other link shortening services like the bit.ly that Lance mentions but, personally, I've had problems with using links created by just about every service except TinyURL - somehow, TinyURL has never let me down. I prefer to use up a few extra characters and stick with what works.

I also assume that folks know that if I'm putting up a link to free brushes that the brushes are worthy of notice, but sometimes I can't help myself so I add that I like them. In future I'll be putting in place Lance's suggestion to do ME:They Rock type additions... ME: I think that suggestion rocks!

I'm also always stripping out extra spaces and full stops when I post. I'm a big fan of using ellipsis... if you haven't noticed but on Twitter they just gobble up precious space. Instead I use dashes between words-they still give me the change of pace I need but don't take up any more space than a space would.

As for one of Lance's suggestions that you remove unnecessary vowels, I'm reluctant to misspell words by removing vowels. I am a little old school here and I prefer to spell correctly - it's all about my brand - I pride myself on accuracy - technical and otherwise so I never want my tweets to go out in a way that might have someone look at them and think I don't know how to spell or that I'm careless about accuracy. That said, this is my pet peeve - you make your own choices!

PowerPoint slide show file - PPSX vs PPTX

What is in a name? Is there a difference between a PowerPoint 2007 PPSX and a PPTX file? (or a PPS and a PPT file in PowerPoint 2003 and earlier versions?)

The simple answer is, of course, yes there is a difference.

The long answer explains that difference so sit tight, here's the long version:

The PowerPoint Slide Show files (PPSX and PPS) are files you can double-click on in Windows Explorer and the presentation will launch and start to display automatically bypassing PowerPoint itself. When you exit the presentation you will be taken back to Windows rather than left in PowerPoint with the presentation layout visible on the screen.

On the other hand, when you double click to open a PPTX or PPT file, it opens inside PowerPoint ready for editing or presenting. When you're done, you get dumped back in PowerPoint with, you guessed it, your presention visible on the screen - not very professional if your audience is watching.

To save a presentation as a PPS file in PowerPoint 2003 and earlier, choose File > Save As and from the Save As Type dropdown list choose PowerPoint Show (*.pps) and click Save. In PowerPoint 2007, choose File > Save As > PowerPoint Show and the correct format will be automatically created for you.

PPSX and PPS files can be edited in PowerPoint in the same way as PPTX and PPT files can - you just have to open PowerPoint first and then choose File > Open to open the PPSX or PPS file as you can't double click to open it.

So, now you know.

Instant text boxes in Microsoft Word

Just a short tip today, I just tripped over this and thought "WOW! I didn't know that!" so I wonder if you know it too?

Ok.. step back a bit. I'm doing a column on columns in Word and I'm showing how to place a text box or image in a document laid out in 2 columns so the text box or image travels with the text and how to take it out of the line of text so it floats independently.

To create the text box, I select my text, then realize I need to create the text box first and click the Text box button without deselecting the text. [insert WOW moment in here].

What happened was that the text box got created automatically and the selected text appears inside it - just like that - how cool is that?

So, next time, instead of creating a text box and then copying and pasting text into it, select the text and click the Text Box button on the Drawing toolbar in Word 2003 and earlier and it will all be done automatically for you in one smooth step. The same process works in Word 2007 too but you must click the Insert tab, click the Text box button and choose Draw Text Box for it to happen.

Instant text in text boxes in Microsoft Word - can't ask for anything more simple than that.

Protect part of a Word document

You know when it happens. You're developing a template or document for someone to work on and you know that they will clobber part of it when you least expect it. So, you want to protect this from happening and make sure your document never gets destroyed.

Problem is how to do it?

Solution? Read on..

Ok.. so, Word has a document protection feature you can use but it only protects the whole document. But, it can be tweaked to protect only part - but we have to set it up to work this way. So, you have to add section breaks around the area to protect. Pretty easy to do. Click just above where the protection is to start and choose Insert > Break > Continuous - this adds a continuous section break in at this point and, because it's continuous there isn't really any indication it's there.

Move to just beyond the area to protect and repeat to add another continuous section break. If you just want to protect the beginning or end of your document you only need one section break.

So far, so good. Now for the protection bit. Choose Tools > Protect Document and in the Editing Restrictions area, click the checkbox and from the list choose Filling in Forms. Now click Select Sections and check the sections to protect (ie leave the ones you want to be able to edit unchecked).

Then click Yes, Start Enforcing Protection and, if desired, add a password.

Now users are locked out of the protected area of the document and they can't change it.

In Word 2007 it works just the same. Find the section breaks in Page Layout > Breaks > Continuous and the protection tool in Review > Protect Document > Restrict Formatting and Editing.

Neat huh?