Note: This is the first edition of the Geek Comic, which will be a weekly comic featuring the Geek and a number of other interesting characters. Subscribe to the RSS feed for the latest comic as well as your daily dose of How-To articles. Suggestions for new comics are welcome.
If you want to share a small part of your Excel worksheet but don’t want to send an Excel file, you can copy part of the worksheet to the clipboard as a picture instead, which can be pasted into any application that supports images, such as your favorite image editor.
When you are including graphics in a Word document many times you want to place the image in a particular way or at a certain angle. Word 2007 has just the tool for the job.
I have begun Alpha testing on Cerulean Studios Trillian Astra the new version of the Trillian IM client. I thought I would share with you the look and feel of this new application as it goes through development. Remember, this is still in Alpha testing.
If you like to use Windows Calculator to perform quick calculations while in Excel, you can save time by adding it to your Quick Access Toolbar. This should work for any version of Excel that has the Ribbon.
Completely uninstalling iTunes from your computer is one huge hassle. If you happened to download the version with the iPhone update it’s even more so. The program likes to claw itself deep into your system. The following is a series of screen shots demonstrating the hassle. This is removal of iTunes 7.3 from an XP machine.
As I wrote in my previous post; Apple upset me pretty bad with it’s iPhone update. Also, iTunes’ horrible performance on Vista leaves nothing to be desired. The iPhone update was the final straw for me. I have decided to ditch iTunes for a new music player. To read about the nightmare of completely uninstalling iTunes from your computer check out “iTunes Uninstall Hassle“. I have been an iTunes user for many years. So choosing a new player is not going to be easy. Many trials and tribulations are ahead in this quest. I have decided to document my findings as I go along.
Having switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu recently, the first thing that irritated me beyond all reason was that single-clicking on a file or folder immediately opens the file instead of selecting it. Since I use Windows and Ubuntu on a daily basis, it’s just frustrating that it works differently in KDE.
If you are a Firefox power user like I am, then you probably have dozens of tabs open all the time. After trying a number of different options, I’ve finally settled on using multiple rows of tabs as the best option.
One of my friends contacted me a while back asking why the default setting in Outlook 2007 is to not mark items as read until you switch to a different email, which leaves the new mail notification sitting in the system tray even though you’ve clearly read the email.
You have a directory full of log files that you want to import into Excel or a database so you can do some processing on them… but there are hundreds of files… how do you make them into a single file?
If you receive an error saying “Tunepimp (MusicBrainz tagging library) returned the following error: “Fingerprinting of .mp3 files is not supported” when you are attempting to fill in the tags on your mp3 files using Amarok’s MusicBrainz plugin, then you’ve come to the right place.
One of the best new features in Outlook 2007 is the To-Do bar, where you have quick access to your calendar as well as your task list. Unfortunately, the default setting of showing all of your tasks regardless of date can be overwhelming for anybody that has a lot of tasks, and just isn’t all that helpful.
Ever since my friend Daniel educated me on the great “Open Resource” feature in Eclipse, I decided I needed the same feature in Visual Studio as well. After browsing around, I finally found a comparable plugin called VSFileFinder that will work in Visual Studio. It’s not quite as good, but it’s pretty decent.
After becoming addicted to the new experimental Google Beta Shortcuts that let you navigate through results with your keyboard, it started to irritate me that I didn’t get to use the shortcut keys when I use a quick search in the Firefox address bar using the “?” keyword. Good thing it’s a very simple to change.
In Excel if you have a long entry in a cell the text automatically spans into multiple columns. Here’s how simple Excel 2007 makes the task of wrapping text in worksheet cells.
Excel has a zoom feature so that you can increase the size of the entire document, but sometimes you just want to zoom in on a specific set of cells that you are working on, and Excel 2007 makes this task simple.
Chart, numbers, worksheets … at a business presentation it can get rather monotonous looking at the same data sheets. Here is a way to add background graphics to your Excel spreadsheets to spice up those meetings.
For those of you who care about the iPhone make sure you get this update.
Do you sigh when it comes to starting up your computer because it takes what seems an eternity to boot up? Here is a quick tip which should make your computer start up faster by removing startup items quickly.
If you want to backup your DVD’s many times the data on the disc goes over the 4.7GB mark. The most reliable software solution I use is DVD Shrink. This free application allows you to compress various parts of the DVD you want to backup. You can get rid of titles, long credit endings, and completely backup and entire DVD to your Hard Drive. You can also compress audio, delete extra languages, in fact you can completely re-author an entire DVD! When used with DVD burning software such as Nero it is a breeze to backup your DVD collection.
So you’ve got MySQL on your web server, but it’s only opened to local ports by default for security reasons. If you want to access your database from a client tool like the MySQL Query Browser, normally you’d have to open up access from your local IP address… but that’s not nearly as secure.
After a dozen times of accidentally sending a Word 2007 document to co-workers still stuck on Office 2003, I’ve decided to make Word save in the Word 2003 format by default. (you can do the same thing in Excel)
When I need to perform a repetitive task such as checking my email or switching to an open IM window, the quickest option is to assign a hotkey directly to the window, so I can toggle the window minimized/restored with nothing more than a single keystroke.
With all the hype about the Ribbon, one of the more overlooked new features in Office 2007 is the Quick Access toolbar, which can be tremendously useful if you just take the time to customize it.
