Tips, Tricks, and Techy Tidbits

What are shortcut menus? The menu that pops up when you right-click in Windows. Why would you want to customize a shortcut menu? Why not?

I spend a lot of time teaching folks in law firms why Paste Special, Unformatted Text is an excellent way to NOT paste all the crud from cut or copied text. Wouldn’t it be great to have the Paste Special command on the shortcut menu, as well as Paste?

Here’s the scoop … Read the rest of this entry »

Word tracks the name of a person making changes, when Track Changes is turned on. There may be times when you don’t want the name of the person(s) making changes in a document to appear. What can be done to keep this information “anonymous”?

Two ideas … Read the rest of this entry »

Popular keyboard shortcuts … quickly cycle through open Word documents.  Much faster than mousing around!

Ctrl + F6 (hold down the Ctrl key and then press the F6 key) cycles you “forwards” and Shift + Ctrl + F6 cycles you “backwards” through the stack of open Word docs.

Have you worked in a Word 2002 or 2003 document and noticed oddly named styles?

For example, a style named BodyText may exist – and you notice a style named BodyText + First line: 1″, or BodyText + Italic. Not only do the styles seem oddly named, but if you’re accustomed to working with the Styles and Formatting pane open it gets a bit crowded with all those variations on a style name.

What’s going on? What creates those styles? And, how could this be useful to you, or is this just one of Word’s diabolical evil ways?

Let’s look at Tools, Options, the Edit tab, Keep track of formatting.

The Keep track of formatting choice, when selected, is the setting that causes Word to create new style names when you manually format a paragraph already using a style.

Read the rest of this entry »

Image files, especially digital photos, can be quite large. There are many ways to reduce the file size - some methods more exotic or cumbersome than others. If you’re looking for tips on quickly reducing the file size and sending the digital photos on their way, we’ve got two tips for you!

Method One
In Windows XP, open the folder where the photos are stored. You may have stored them in “My Pictures” folder, or sub-folders thereof.

Select the photo(s) you want to e-mail. (Reminder: to select more than one, press the CTRL key while you click multiple photos.) Read the rest of this entry »

You may want to print a Word document minus its tracked changes. You can do that - nothing to it! From the File menu, choose Print. Click the Print what list, and choose Document, instead of Document showing markup. It’s that easy! How many of never really look through various options in often used dialog boxes? This type of tip is my reminder to open my eyes and see more!

I’m always on the lookout for well written Excel tips for crunching large amounts of data.  Seems many of the litigators I know need to analyze large datasets.  Allen Wyatt’s ExcelTips Online is a terrific resource.  He offers a weekly e-mail newsletter, and 2 RSS feeds - Daily Nuggets and the Weekly Classic.

Check out this tip - Deriving Monthly Median Values - the example looks at sixty years worth of data and offers two strategies for finding the monthly median value.  He explains as he goes, which makes his tips even more valuable.  I believe you could take this tip and run with it to suit your needs.

Yes, I’m finally back. After weeks of illness, back troubles, and juggling work, interspersed with trying to bring a renovated vacation rental cabin to market, getting married, and then dealing with my husband’s knee injury, I’m finally able to think about posting to this blog.

Thanks to the friends and loyal readers who dropped me a note of concern. It was much appreciated and made the days brighter.

Onward and upward!

Rick Borstein’s blog, Acrobat for Legal Professionals, is worth a visit.  Rick is a Business Development Manager specializing in the Acrobat-Legal Market for Adobe Systems Incorporated. He’s also an Adobe Certified Expert in Acrobat and a member of the American Bar Association and the International Legal Technology Association.

His June 16th post, Commenting on Image-only PDFs,  explores tools in Adobe Acrobat to help you comment and mark-up PDFs that are images only (not OCR’ed text.)  His example was medical records containing signatures and handwritten notes.  I can imagine IP and Real Estate being interested in his recommendations, since they often encounter image-only PDFs.

Adobe Acrobat is a rich program - you or someone in your office should learn as much about it as possible to get the most efficiency from it.

Allison C. Shields is the President of Legal Ease Consulting, Inc. and maintains a blog here.  Her article “Too Much To Do, Too Little Time” appears in July 2006 Law Practice TODAY.  The article’s aimed at attorneys but most of us could read it and learn from it. It reinforced for me the idea that it’s OK to say “No”, and to turn down clients who are more trouble than they’re worth.  Both notions were strange to me when I started on my own a year or so ago … but these are valuable lessons.

Give her blog a visit … and stop by Law Practice TODAY to catch her article and others in this Solo and Small Firm Issue.

I often read Word tips which recommend changing margins, or the “default” font, affecting the Normal template. The tips sound handy … until you wind up with a corrupted Normal template. How do you fix a corrupt Normal template? You blow it away! Delete the thing! Start over! And all your settings and tweaks to the Normal template are down the drain.  I’ve learned the hard way, don’t make changes to the Normal template.
How sad. What to do?

First, let’s define Normal template. As Word is installed “out of the box”, when it opens, it looks for a file named Normal.dot in a certain path. Normal.dot is the Normal template. In end-user speak, Word makes a copy of the Normal template and serves that up as a “fresh blank sheet of paper”.

If you close Word, then hunt down the Normal template and blow it away, then open Word again, Word regenerates a new Normal template. A vanilla outta the box Normal template, not the tweaked fudge ripple template (it’s hot here and I want ice cream!)

So tips to “permanently” change default margins from 1.25″ to 1″ by making a change in the File, Page Setup dialog box, then clicking Default [see screen cap below] are OK - BUT - they don’t really provide a sturdy solution to your need.  Why? Because they make a change to the Normal template.

I’ve thrived on Word since Word 1.1, supported it, used it, cursed it, taught it, always at the end-user level because that’s what I am and that’s who I love. So I want you to have sturdy solutions that stand up to a day in your life with Word.

What to do if you know you always want to start a new blank document with margins 1″ all around, a Normal style of Georgia 12 points, first page headers/footers different ? You create a template with these settings [we'll do that in my next post].

Before you create the template, think about how you want to use it - for letters, all Word documents, memos, faxes, outlines, etc.? As you think, try to tease out any default or boilerplate text [such as for a fax coversheet] because we can create several templates with different boilerplate text, if need be.

The next post is going to cover creating that simple all purpose template and provide you with a few ideas for making the template very accessible.  We’ll also look at using the template as a “base” for cleaning up a messy, badly formatted, possibly corrupted document.

Meanwhile, pineapple sherbet sounds good.

A few Excel tips on a hot summer afternoon …

• Press Alt + Enter to force a new line in a cell.

• To quickly select all the cells in a spreadsheet, click the “cell” above the Row 1 cell, to the left of the Col A cell [see the fat plus sign in the screen cap below?]
  
  Or, use Ctrl + A , the universal Windows keyboard shortcut for Select All.

• Quickly set column widths as wide as they need to be - place the mouse pointer between the column headings [see screen cap below] - and double-click.
  
  Select contiguous multiple columns by pressing and dragging the mouse across column headings - watch the pointer - it should take on the appearance of a downward pointing arrow.
  
  Select non-contiguous columns by holding down Ctrl key while using the mouse to select various columns.  Once the above selections have been made, you can set column widths as mentioned in the 1st part of this tip.

My favorite newsletter, Spyware Weekly, is back.  Yayy!

Read or subscribe to Spyware Weekly at SpywareInfo.  SpywareInfo are hijackware and spyware removal specialists.  I’ve found the information shared on this site to be reliably top notch and timely.  There’s lots of background information for those who want to learn, and only excellent products are recommended.  Mike Healan’s opinions, rants and raves about privacy, security, and the state of computing are thought provoking, as well.

Welcome back Mike!

Andy Seldon’s Do’s and Don’ts of High-Tech Trial Presentations in Law Technology News (July 6) is especially useful because it doesn’t just concentrate on presenting technlogy … it focuses on common mistakes and suggests best practices so you can comfortably and professionally work with tech available to you in the courtroom.

Andy makes 10 well founded points. It would behoove you to read this article and absorb these points.

The 10 points are:

- Failing to learn and exploit technology.

- Incompatibility.

- Objectionable evidence.

- Going solo.

- Unprepared witnesses.

- Muddy waters.

- Overusing technology.

- No backup plan.

- Failing to make the necessary arrangements with court staff and checking the local rules.

- Not matching the technology to the case.

Andy Seldon is an attorney and is the director of information services for the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, based in Minneapolis.

Excel workbooks can contain many spreadsheets - indeed the max is limited only by memory. Navigating a workbook containing many spreadsheets can be annoying - scrolling back and forth looking for the spreadsheet you want to work with, or using keyboard shortcuts to flip through many sheets is really inefficient.

Here’s a quick way to jump to the spreadsheet you want to work with:

Right-click any of the navigation arrows (located towards the lower left of the workbook window). Choose the desired spreadsheet from the resultant shortcut menu. Fast!