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?

Day 2 of 30 days with Ubuntu

I have created (yet) another blog, 30 days with Ubuntu. Two days ago, I reformatted my laptop (and lost all my photos which I cleverly forgot to backup) and installed the newest version of Ubuntu, version 10.04 which was released just a week ago. I will be using Ubuntu for 30 days, and as I go, every day I will may write my experience with Ubuntu, on things such as how usable it actually is, whether it can really eliminate my dependency on Windows, etc.

Do take a look at 30 days with Ubuntu if you are interested or considering to try a Linux operating system.

If you don't know what Ubuntu is...

Tip #34: Make your Windows PC "brand new" by reformatting it

Time and again I have heard people say that they want to reformat their Windows PC, but they don't know how to do it. And there are actually people who dare not reformat their PC because they fear that they might lose all their data. Mind you, the word "reformat" already makes it clear that you are going to wipe clean everything from your hard drive/partition with Windows on it and reinstall a fresh copy of Windows with nothing except the bare essentials like Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer (no Microsoft Office nor Works included, you will have to install that yourself). To put an end to this, I have decided it's about time I pen down this common computing practice in writing.

If your PC was purchased from an OEM like Dell, HP or Acer, you might have a recovery partition hidden in your hard disk which you can access by pressing a special key combination before Windows starts up when you turn on your PC. This method restores your PC to its original state as when it left the factory. Steps for this vary between OEMs, hence I will not go into detail on that here. Frankly speaking, I don't see why you would want to restore your PC to its factory default state with all the probably-useless applications your OEM has preloaded for you (things like HP MediaSmart, Acer GameZone, Dell Backup etc). If you do want them back, most of them can be downloaded from the OEM's website after you have reinstalled Windows.

To reformat your computer (without using OEM recovery methods), you will need:

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 #29: Convert music files from any format to any format

If you read this earlier post on how to import FLAC files into iTunes on Mac and were like "damn, what about us iPod users using Windows?", then this tip is especially for you. dBpoweramp Music Converter (for Windows, can be run on Linux using Wine [sorry Macs! nothing for you this time] ) can convert your music files from nearly any format to any format you could possibly think of (and perhaps even formats you have never even heard of).

But wait - what does this have to do with our previous problem of iTunes on Windows not being able to deal with FLAC files? We will use dMC to convert the FLAC files into Apple Lossless format, which iTunes can natively support. Additionally, we can also use dMC to convert the FLAC files into Windows Media Audio Lossless format, so that those who are using Windows Media Player need not go through the process of installing FLAC codecs and tag support for Windows Media Player.

Poll: If you could, would you ditch iTunes?

I don't have an iPod or iPhone, but I have experienced using iTunes before to load songs onto a Motorola Razr which had iTunes in it. Using iTunes was quite a pain then. Most of my songs ripped from CDs were in Windows Media Audio format, and iTunes converted all those files into AACs, thus I ended up having double-copies of some songs. Like how I see most people do, I had to manually search for album covers using Google and drag-and-drop it into iTunes. Song metadata wasn't automatically updated either. Windows Media Player, for example, can fill in the missing blanks in tags (i.e. you have the song title and artist, but not the album name). And recently, I covered the fact that iTunes doesn't play FLAC files or other new and emerging open source formats such as Ogg Vorbis. Shouldn't iPod owners have the freedom to use whatever file format they want to?

From what I heard, most people are forced to use iTunes, not because they like iTunes, but because they have an iPod or iPhone which they love, yet they cannot load songs just by drag-and-drop from My Computer. The truth is, there are alternatives to iTunes out there which can sync to your iPod/iPhone. Whether these media players also handle other stuff like syncing apps on the iPod Touch, or syncing your iPhone contacts with Microsoft Outlook - honestly I don't know.

Therefore, the first ever poll on Your Tip Jar, will be:

If you could, would you ditch iTunes?
(the poll is at the top of the sidebar)

If you are using an iPod or iPhone, please do submit your vote for this poll. If the response is good enough, I may test drive a media player called MediaMonkey, which can sync music to iPods, iPhones and a range of other devices, using my dad's iPhone or a friend's iPod.

A short disclaimer: the accuracy and reliability of the facts in this post can be severely disputed - as I stress the point again - I do not use iTunes.

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 #26: Snip an image of your Windows desktop

Since Window Vista, a utility called Snipping Tool was included to make the frequent task of taking screenshots of your desktop easier. Prior to that in XP, you would have to press the Print Screen key on your keyboard, open Paint or whatever program you want to use, paste and then save the print screen (how troublesome). With the Snipping Tool, you can immediately see what you captured, add annotations (markings, scribbles etc) and then either save it as an image file, or copy it to the clipboard to paste elsewhere.

The Snipping Tool is in Start > All Programs > Accessories; you can also just open the Start menu and type "Snipping Tool" (without the quotes), followed by Enter.

Tip #25 [Word, Excel]: Undo and clear formatting styles

what do these icons mean?

While working in Office, some people might
get a bit too colourful or creative...

You just changed every single word in your Word document to a different font and size. Or you made a rainbow table in Excel while typing in your daily accounts. Now how do you reset your entire document, or spreadsheet, or part of either one, to the original font, size, style, color and everything?

In Word and Excel, there is a Clear Formatting tool which can turn everything back to boring, black-and-white, standard size 12 or 10, Times New Roman (in Word) or Arial (in Excel) or Calibri. Using the tool is a piece-of-cake: just select the text or cell(s) which you want to clear away all formatting, then click on the Clear Formatting icon or option in the menus.

Where can you find the Clear Formatting tool in Word and Excel?

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 #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 #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 #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.

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!!

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 #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".