Steve Richards: Tips

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Thu, 26 Aug 2004 18:56:34 GMT

I have a new blog so this blog is now closed down!

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http://steves.businessblog.com/

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http://steves.businessblog.com/blog/index.xml

If you want to know why I switched have a look here

http://steves.businessblog.com/blog/_archives/2004/8/25/129522.html

Yet More on PowerPoint

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 11:29:00 GMT

More PowerPoint posts continue to catch my eye. The first is from Brad Fled, a venture capitalist who has recently invested in NewsGator, Brad writes:

I've looked at thousands (tens of thousands?) presentations pitching new businesses since the mid 1990's. The vast majority of them suck. Unfortunately, it's not Powerpoint's fault (no - it wouldn't be better if Freelance has become the standard).

Brad points us to:

Edward Tufte - a master of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, thinks Powerpoint is evil and corrupts absolutely

He also gives us a good outline presentation for pitching to a VC, which is definately worth checking out if you ever have the need. In fact its a good start if you need to make a pitch for any kind of investment.

More on PowerPoint

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 12:45:50 GMT

Powerpoint seems to be cropping up all over in my blogs at the moment. I am a big user of PowerPoint. I recently checked my local machine using X1 and I have 669 PP files at the moment. Anyway I was pleased to come across this post by Michael Hyatt which point to all of his favourite Powerpoint Resources on the web, they are repeated here, but for more details Visit Michael's blog. I have added to and annotated his list, you gan get the details here ...

PowerPoint, putting the audience in control

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 21:02:33 GMT

One of my friend's posts pointed me to beyond bullets a blog about communications. It was strange because a few minutes later I came across another link in another feed I was reading so I decided to check it out. I liked this post on the Presentation Dashboard, an idea for putting the audience in control. I like this concept very much and have used it myself many times in different forms; here are a few of them:

1. I have created several PowerPoints that I designed not to be presented but to be emailed out or web delivered and navigated around. This was done with lots of buttons and links and was very effective. We also used this idea for training courses

2. This worked so well that I changed my PowerPoint standard template and so that I created a master slide with index buttons all the way down the left hand side. Because it was in the master it appeared on every slide. When I presented it made it very easy to jump around the presentation following up on any topics the audience wanted to discuss. Depending on which section you were in the appropriate link had a bright yellow border, this prevented me getting lost, (some of the packs had 100 plus slides), and gave the audience context.

3. I also created quite a few master presentations that linked to other presentations. Each link went to index pages. These worked great to, I called them "Master Slide Packs" and were particularly useful for new users joining my teams.

4. Finally I evolved the master slide pack idea, and started doing document maps, again full of links to documents and presentations. Sometimes these maps were graphical, but I think in the end the narrative types were the best because they allowed me to talk through a project from its history and background all the way through to the latest information and how to keep up to date with the project. As you followed the narrative there were links throughout to the documents, document libraries, presentations or associated web sites.

All of these were examples of putting the audience in control. I use X1 to index my PC, I just checked I have 699 PowerPoints on it at the moment!

Tips for using Lotus Notes and GTD methodology

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 10:51:56 GMT

I recently read Getting Things Done, and wanted to apply it using Lotus Notes. I struggled a bit and to tell the truth I have not fully implemented it even after a month of playing around. I am trying again now that I have a new PDA, better synchronisation software, mNotes and some hints and tips from Eric Mack on using Notes and GTD and on using Notes for task and action management.

Sorting in Excel

Sun, 30 May 2004 00:15:44 GMT

Sorting by a single column in Outlook is a simple matter of clicking on the column head. Sorting by multiple columns, however, is not so obvious. But it's actually quite easy. First, sort by the first criterion, such as From, by clicking on the column head. Then hold the Shift key down as you click on a second heading, such as Received. Your messages will be sorted primarily by sender, and all the messages from each sender will be ordered chronologically. You can even add additional columns to sort by. Outlook will sort your messages by each additional criterion within the earlier criteria to give you a multicolumn sort.

Lists in Excel

Sun, 30 May 2004 00:12:06 GMT

In earlier versions of Excel, it was difficult to create a chart that expands when data is added to the end of one or more of the series. Excel 2003's List feature solves this problem. To designate a data area as a list, click in a cell in the soon-to-be list, and choose Data | List | Create List. Then create your chart using the list data. Now, whenever you add new data to your list, the data area plotted by the chart expands automatically to include it.

Lists are good for other things as well, they can be published, maintained and synchronised with Windows SharePoint Services lists. So its a good idea to get into the habit of using them whenever you can.

Split window in Word

Sun, 30 May 2004 00:07:04 GMT

Are you worried about the consistency of your introduction and conclusion? A spectacular yet underused feature is Word's ability to display two different parts of a document at the same time. To do this, you can either select the Split option from the Window menu to display a dividing line in the current window. Alternatively, you can drag down the tiny divider tool at the top of the right scroll bar. You can navigate to different parts of the document in each pane and use F6 to jump between them.

Compare documents

Sat, 29 May 2004 23:42:00 GMT

In Word 2003, you can compare documents side by side. Open two documents. Then, from the Window menu of one of them, select the Compare Side By Side command. If you have only two documents open, the command will automatically choose to compare them. If you have three or more documents open, you'll have to select which document to compare with the current file.

A floating toolbar with two buttons will open. If the button on the left is selected, Word will scroll both documents at the same time. Press the button on the right side of the toolbar to return to where the cursor was located when you started comparing.

Calculator in Word

Sat, 29 May 2004 23:39:55 GMT

Did you know you can add a calculator to Word's toolbars or menus? Go to View | Toolbars | Customize and choose the Commands tab. In the list of categories, go to Tools, select Tools Calculate in the list of commands, and drag it to a toolbar or drop-down menu. After you drop the command on the toolbar or menu, immediately right-click on the command, choose Change Button Image from the pop-up menu, and choose the calculator icon.

You can use the same pop-up menu to specify whether to display text, an icon, or both in the toolbar. Now, type a simple calculation (try 2 + 2) in a Word document, highlight it, and click on the new icon or menu item. To replace the calculation with the result, just press Ctrl-V. Before you press Ctrl-V, note that the result appears in the status line at the bottom of the window.

Lines in word

Sat, 29 May 2004 23:38:27 GMT

You can create a line across the page of your Word or Outlook document with just a few keystrokes. Type three consecutive hyphens and press Enter to get a normal line. Type three underscores and Enter, and you'll get a bold line. And if you type three equal signs and press Enter, you'll get a double line.

Zoom in and out with your scroll wheel

Sat, 29 May 2004 23:34:04 GMT

You can use the scroll button on your mouse to zoom in and out of documents quickly. Just hold down the Ctrl key and roll the scroll wheel forward to get a closer view of the document, or roll it back to shrink it.

Moving paragraphs

Sat, 29 May 2004 23:32:39 GMT

Do you need to swap the second and third paragraphs in the document you're working on? Don't waste time dragging text around within your document using the mouse. Just click on the paragraph you'd like to move, hold down Shift-Alt, and move the paragraph up or down using the arrow keys. Each press of the arrow key causes the selected paragraph to jump over one adjacent paragraph.

Preview slide show whilst editing

Sat, 29 May 2004 23:31:21 GMT

For a quick preview of a slide show while you're editing a presentation, hold down the Ctrl key while clicking on View Show in the Slide Show menu. Instead of launching in full-screen mode, the presentation, starting with the current slide, will appear in a small window atop the slide being edited. To edit the slide and see your changes in real time, resize the PowerPoint window so the preview slide is in view. Any modifications you make will instantly appear in the preview window.

If you have two monitors it appears that the slide show has to be on your primary, but no problem, just move your editing window to your secondary.

Anyone planning a migration to Access 2003, needs to take a look at this when its released!

Sat, 29 May 2004 16:19:15 GMT

Joe reports:

We announced this week the Microsoft Office Access 2003 Conversion Toolkit which will be available around the time that Office 2003 SP1 is released this summer. In marketing-speak: the Access 2003 Conversion Toolkit is a set of tools and documentation designed to help organizations discover, evaluate and convert their Access databases as part of the upgrade process. Sounds useful? You bet! Companies considering moving to a new version ...

Companies considering moving to a new version of Office have not had good tools to help them understand the how to manage Access solutions. This toolkit will help IT understand what type of Access databases they have out there and will provide guidance as to what might be done with them – upgrade, migrate to SQL server, keep as is.

RSS Extended Attributes

Fri, 28 May 2004 23:39:45 GMT

I blogged here and here about my ideas for the future of RSS and similar XML based technologies and how I use them myself. I then came across some stuff on RSS extended attributes, and the support for them in NewsGator and outlook 2003. So I built a little demo, here’s how:

First I took a copy of my RSS feed and put it here
I edited it to add a private namespace <rss version="2.0" xmlns:steve="http://example.org/cool">
Then I added an extended attribute Technology to about half of the entries in the feed, for some I set the technology to DATA, and for others to DESKTOP, like this <steve:Technology>Desktop</steve:Technology>
Look at the actual RSS file for more details
If you want you can subscribe to this feed for your own demo, but its not very impressive, so I encourage you to build your own!
Next in NewsGator, select the folder you want and pick Options
Then go to the render tab and the column mappings dialog.
Add a new namespace, in my case its prefix is Steve and its URI is http://example.org/cool
The add a column, name Technology, Type Text and Xpath originalItem/item/steve:Technology
Then create a folder under your RSS root folder called Steve Richards Test Blog
In Outlook click on the new folder and right click on the column headings and pick customize. Add a new custom column called Technology. Fields -> User Defined Fields In Folder -> New Field
Then subscribe to my feed, it should get delivered into the customised folder
The custom attribute should then be displayed for the feed items as they arrive, you can sort, group by etc on this attribute
Here's what it looked like in outlook in the end

Now that was a lot of work for not much gain, but that’s how it is with hand crafted demo’s. If the RSS feeds were already created, and the client side UI a bit more integrated, (i.e. no separate NewsGator and Outlook configuration), and the UI already understood the most common extended attribute sets then you can see that the experience would be pretty rich.

I guess this is exactly where MS want to take us with WinFS and the Longhorn shell, so its worth thinking around the concepts now.

The examples for how to use this stuff that immediately spring to mind are RSS feeds for:

Documents libraries
Film reviews
Book reviews
Scheduled events
Price lists

Poking around the web I found the following:

A proposal of an extended attribute set for scheduled events
A simpler proposal for events
There are quite a few standard attributes to play with as well, not sure if they work the same though, if at all as they don’t have a namespace
This is where I got the idea from

Show the desktop

Thu, 27 May 2004 19:37:02 GMT

The keyboard shortcut for "Minimize All" is [Windows logo] + M and the keyboard shortcut for "Show Desktop" is [Windows logo] + D. How are they different?

"Minimize All" is easier to describe. It minimizes all the windows that support the "Minimize" command. You can minimize a window by selecting "Minimize" from its System menu, or by clicking the [Minimize] button in the title bar. So "Minimize All" is effectively the same as going to each window that is open and clicking the Minimize button. If there is a window that doesn't have a Minimize button, then it is left alone.

"Show Desktop" takes "Minimize All" one step further. After minimizing all the windows that can be minimized, it then takes the desktop and "raises" it to the top of the window stack so that no other windows cover it. (Well, okay, topmost windows continue to cover it.)

So "Show Desktop" manages to get a few more windows out of your way than "Minimize All".

Note, however, that when you return the desktop to its normal state (either by selecting "Show Open Windows" or just by switching to another window), all the un-minimizeable windows come back because the desktop has "lowered" itself back to the bottom of the window stack.

Minimized windows. [Windows logo] + D is a toggle. Press it once to show the desktop; press it again to put all open windows back in their previous places.

[Windows logo] + M is not a toggle. After minimizing all windows with this keyboard shortcut, you can bring them back by pressing [Windows logo] + Shift + M.