Tip #36: [Word, Excel, Powerpoint] Resize pictures while maintaining proportion

        what do these icons mean?

You draw a square in Word, and you resize it by dragging the dots in the corners, but alas, it becomes a rectangle! What do you do?

Tip #31: Custom searches from the Google Chrome address bar

If you are using Google Chrome, then by now you should have probably noticed that you can immediately begin a Google search by typing directly into the address bar (aka "Omnibox"), instead of going to www.google.com and searching from there. But did you also know that you can perform custom searches, i.e. search using other search engines or websites, from the address bar too?

For instance, I can search for an article on Wikipedia, just by typing "wiki", followed by the search terms into my address bar and pressing Enter, like this.

Tip #27: Import FLAC into iTunes (on Mac) and sync to your iPod

Using iTunes on Windows? Read this post instead.

If you own an iPod, and you are seriously hooked on lossless music formats like FLAC (like me), you are slightly out of luck: iPods don't support FLAC, but they do however support Apple's own lossless format called Apple Lossless. On Windows, iTunes doesn't even let you import FLAC files into your library. I have found a tutorial to import FLAC files into iTunes on Mac, play them, and convert them to Apple Lossless for syncing to an iPod. The video did help a great deal, you can watch it to see it in action step by step, but the author did miss out a critical step. Here are the complete steps to do it if you are using iTunes on a Mac.

Tip #24 [Word, Excel, Powerpoint]: Copy text formatting using Format Painter

what do these icons mean?

The mysterious paintbrush tool, which seems to
have done nothing so far to ease our Office tasks...

Perhaps like me, you have been wondering what that paintbrush icon in Microsoft Office is used for. I actually didn't know either, until quite recently (a few years back actually). The paintbrush tool, named the Format Painter, is used to copy and paste text formatting in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

Take note: the Format Painter lets you copy and paste (or paint/apply) formatting from one selected text to another, meaning font, size, color, background, line spacing, etc. It is different from the usual copy and paste procedure, which you will end up with a duplicate of the copied text.

How can we make use of the Format Painter to make our lives easier? Here's an example in Word.

Tip #23: More ways to create Wordles

If you can't get enough of those arty word clouds Wordle has been creating for you, here are some ways to make creating Wordles easier.

First of all, you might have noticed that Wordle treats each word in a phrase as seperate words, so long as they have a space in between. Suppose you wanted to create a Wordle of things to do when you grow up:

get a job, buy a car, marry someone, become your own boss, live on a golf course, retire early

To us, the commas make sense in that they divide the words into items or phrases. But when we try to create a Wordle by pasting the above text... we get this on the right.

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 #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 #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 #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 #6: Play any file format there is

In tip #5 I showed you how to steal videos from YouTube and other websites, but I left out the part on how to play those downloaded FLV files. If you don't already have a play-it-all media player application or necessary codecs installed, here is a simple (and dirty) trick for getting those FLV files (and other multimedia files you have trouble with) to play.

Tip #5: Download videos from webpages

If you wanted to save an image on a webpage to your computer, you can just right click on it and choose "Save Image". That's easy. How about videos, or perhaps songs? And by that I don't mean links which you can click on to download them, I mean those which are streaming in a Flash player (like on YouTube and other sites). For this, you will need a thingy, called a "download grabber".