Tip #22: Create fancy word clouds for anything

Tags on Your Tip Jar so far, created using Wordle.

Word clouds (like the one shown here on the right) are fun, simple and artistic ways to convey a message. Creating a word cloud manually though, isn't really fun, and does require a certain degree of artisticness as well as computer drawing skills to achieve. Luckily, I've stumbled upon this online tool, Wordle, which lets you easily create nice-looking word clouds (called Wordles) like the one I created here, without needing much effort nor artistic capabilities.

The great thing about Wordle is that word clouds created using it are free for any use, as long as you attribute it to www.wordle.net (meaning, if you use a Wordle on your blog, you should have a link back to the website like in the caption on the right).

Tip #21: Get Dropbox

1. You have more than one computer (e.g. desktop and laptop), and you often find it troublesome to move files between the two.
2. You are working on a team project, and you want to share files with group members and keep the files always up to date.
3. You want to share some files for downloading from your blog, using a public link like this, but your file is too big for certain online file hosts. (e.g. Rapidshare has a limit of 200MB per file)
4. You just want to store your files online so you can access them away from home.

If any of your needs look like the ones listed above, you need Dropbox. Dropbox is an online file storage service which gives you 2GB (up to 5GB via referrals) for free. You can use this 2GB to store any of your files, synchronise them among your computers (and iPhone), and share them with others who may or may not be using Dropbox.

Tip #20: Managing files in Windows quickly

This is how it's usually done with right-click.

Things you can do with files in Windows: open, save, delete, rename, move, copy, etc. There are many ways to do these, the easiest is to right click on any file or folder, then choose an action to apply onto it.

Working with both hands on the keyboard lets you work faster. However, when you have tens and hundreds of files to organise, using the arrow keys to paddle around the folder may not be the ideal thing to do. Using the mouse to point-and-click would be faster, then to quickly apply an action on the selected item(s) we can use keyboard shortcuts so that the mouse isn't doing all the work.

Tip #17: Become a tabmaster

Remember the old times when you had to do this?

Now that you can handle forms easily, today I'll show you how to master tabbed browsing. Back in the days of Internet Explorer 6, we would have to open one window for every single webpage, unless if you were using Firefox, Opera or Safari then. With the introduction of IE7 a few years back, tabbed browsing became mainstream. Yet, there are still some people around me who don't know how to use tabbed browsing!

Just in case anyone here is still not aware of what tabs do, tabs let you open multiple pages in a single browser window, so that you don't clutter your taskbar (the long bar with the Start button below) with lots of instances of your web browser. Having multiple instances of your browser open slows down your computer during heavy browsing. Of course, this doesn't quite apply in Mac OS X, since there is only one icon of the running program shown, but still you would have to right-click on the dock icon to pick which Safari window to show, like how Windows XP grouped similar taskbar items together.

Tip #16: Master the art of filling up forms

What if you could jump from field to field?

We spend most of our time on the Internet, and often we need to fill up forms online, especially when logging in to websites. Some websites' registration forms have tens, if not more fields for you to fill up. As mentioned in this previous tip, shifting one hand back and forth between the mouse and keyboard slows you down. To be able to fill forms more quickly, we will need to eliminate this inter-keyboard-and-mouse switching.

This tip should apply to any browser on any operating system. If something doesn't work for you, please let me know so I can help you find a solution for it.

For you to follow along, I have created a dummy form right here for you to try out the keyboard shortcuts as you read!

Tip #15: Disk partitions, or "I have a C and D drive in My Computer"

A peek in My Computer...

Most Windows computers have two hard drives visible in My Computer, usually named C: drive and D: drive (or E: drive). Often, I hear them say "I have two hard drives" - this is usually not true, if your desktop was just purchased, or if you are using a laptop. In actual fact, there is usually a single hard drive, which contains two partitions, shown as two seperate drives in My Computer.

Imagine that we have a huge rectangular apartment with an area of 320 m² and has no walls, which we can both live in it and use as a store room to keep things. A room this big may be difficult to organise its contents and you certainly don't want to live among your pile of collectibles or junk. To make life easier, we could divide the room into one or more smaller rooms by using wall partitions. I could divide the apartment into two smaller rooms or "partitions", one that is 120 m² which I use as my living space, and the other which is 200 m² which I use as my storeroom (so I don't need to look at the mess all the time). How nice!

Tip #14 [Word]: Use page breaks to paginate your document

what do these icons mean?
Word files can contain more than one page, everyone knows that. When your text is too long to fit on one page, Word will automatically continue on a second page. But how do you force Word to start at a new page? You would probably want to do this when you are preparing a report with multiple sections, and you want each section to start on a new page of its own.

I have seen my friends press the Enter key (or Return key on Macs), until they reach the end of the current page, so that Word will move on to a new page and they continue typing there. Although this gets the job done, it is not a wise solution because whenever content in the previous page change, the alignment of content in the following pages will shift either upwards or downwards. To see this in action, try typing a few lines on the first page, then press Enter/Return until you reach the second page, and type a few more lines there. Now, select the text on the first page, and change the font size to 30. Can you see the lines on page 2 shift downwards? (click on the animation to enlarge)

Tip #13: [Word] Word it like in the papers

what do these icons mean?

Today's tip will be the first ever tip for a Microsoft Office application, that is, Microsoft Word to be exact. I will mostly cover Office 2007 for Windows, however when possible, I will try to provide alternative steps for Office 2003 for Windows as well as Office 2008 for Mac. To eliminate the need of explaining which versions of Office a tip applies to, I will place icons of the relevant versions of Office applications. In the case of today's tip, it applies to Word in Office 2003 for Windows, Office 2007 for Windows and Office 2008 for Mac.

Today, I will show you how to position text in your Word documents like columns in newspapers. Before that, type your whole text or news article, since it's easier to select and format text, rather than typing with formatting.

Mac is back!

Time for more Mac tips.

Tip #12: How fast is your Internet, really?

Have you ever heard broadband reseller agents (the people who stand at booths promoting Streamyx / P1 / Celcom Broadband etc) say that you can subscribe for "one megabyte per second" download speed? And when you bring the modem home and managed to get on the Internet to download something, you notice the fastest you can download is at around 100-120 KB (kilobytes) per second. Why, why, why?

If you look at the piece of brochure or promo material (the one on the right is taken from P1's website), you should see that the speed is quoted as 1 Mbps or 1 Mbit/s (note that the 'b' is not capitalised). The reseller agent was wrong for sure, to have said "one megabyte per second" - it is actually one megabit per second.

Tip #11: Careful, Mac OS overwrites, not merges folders

When copying a folder to a destination which has an existing folder of the same name, Mac OS will overwrite the entire contents of the old folder with the new one's, instead of merging the contents (and optionally, overwriting files with the same name) as in Windows.

This tip is best understood by an example, which you could follow along if you are a Mac user. On your Desktop, create a folder named Alice (don't ask why). Open TextEdit, and save an empty text file into that folder, named X. Now go to your home folder, and create a folder also named Alice. Using TextEdit again, save another empty text file into the second Alice folder, named Y.

With your home folder still open in a Finder window, drag the Alice folder which is in your home folder onto your desktop. 

Tip #10: Add multiple-persona-disorder to Firefox

Firefox version 3.6 was released almost 3 weeks ago, but I just discovered one of it's new (probably the best) features - Personas. They're like themes, but simpler, since they only change the background of the menu bars.

Notice that I now have Totoro in my Firefox!!

The good news

Ladies and gentlemen, I have some very, very good news for you:

"So what? That's just a screenshot of Mac OS X." Yes it is, but look...what's in Safari? Your Tip Jar!! This blog is in Safari! No I didn't ask a Mac friend to take the sceenshot for me. And no I didn't just run out to Machines to buy a Mac. I managed to install Mac OS X in VMware, meaning it is running in a virtual machine on my Windows laptop. The good news? I can start providing Mac tips as soon as I get used to Mac OS X!

Tip #9: Cut huge files into smaller pieces

Previously, we've learned that pendrives or hard disks formatted as FAT can not store files larger than 4GB. To overcome this, you would need to reformat your pendrive to NTFS or HFS+. Or, you could also find a way to split that file into multiple pieces, each smaller than 4GB, so that they can be copied onto your pendrive.

There are other situations where splitting files can be useful. Suppose you want to send a file which is 20MB in size, but your email provider limits attachments to a maximum of 10MB per email. No problem, just split the file into two 10MB pieces, and attach them to two emails seperately. What if you wanted to send a 100MB file via MSN Messenger? Messenger doesn't limit the maximum size of files you can send, but what if your connection gets dropped halfway while sending? A safer bet would be to split the file into 10 or 20MB pieces and send them one by one. If you get disconnected, you wouldn't need to send everything again.

Tip #8: Is your hard disk FAT or NTFS?

The first thing that you should do as soon as you purchase a new external hard disk, is to check what filesystem it is formatted with.

The filesystem can be thought of as the "format" of a hard disk. There are several filesystems currently in popular use: FAT (FAT32 to be precise), NTFS and HFS+. Usually most external hard disks nowadays come pre-formatted as FAT, but some also come as NTFS, and if the packaging of the hard disk specifically mentions "for Mac", it should be in HFS+. It is important for you to recognise some of the characteristics of these filesystems to avoid the hassle of reformatting your hard drive later on.

Tip #7: Understand bits and bytes

Ever wondered why, any storage media, be it a hard drive, pendrive or memory card which you own or buy, always seems to have less capacity than advertised? Suppose you buy a 8GB pendrive, when you get home and plug it in, you realise that in My Computer, it shows up as 7.44 GB or so only. Where did the remaining 0.56 GB disappear to?

Before we get to that, let's take a minute to understand how file sizes are calculated.