Sunday, November 30, 2008

This Month in Music: November

Here is a long playlist of music I've found, and enjoyed this past November.

If you know  how to get the music I suggest you do.

Playlist (Artist - Track title; Album):
Everlast - Friend; Love, War, and the Ghost of Whitey Ford
K. T. Tunstall - Hold On; Drastic Fantastic
Kings Of Leon - Sex On Fire; Only By The Night
Coldplay - Lost!; Viva la Vida
Live - I Walk the Line (cover); Awake: The Best of Live
Ryan Adams - Magick; Cardinology
Adele - Right as Rain; 19
Counting Crows - You Can't Count on Me; Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings

and if you really like the music toss a few bucks at the artist or xpn.org I think $3 is a good price for this month in music (just don't give it to coldplay, they have enough money).

Monday, November 10, 2008

New Macro

A macro is an action basically.
Sick of merging a cell, aligning it to top, left, and then turning on word wrap in Excel (2003)? Me too, let's make a macro for it.

  1. Fire up Excel
  2. Tools > Macro > Record New Macro
  3. Title it: MergeWrap, Store in: Personal Macro Workbook, Hit OKey Dokey (a little macro box will pop up that is now recording whatever you do!)
  4. Highlight a few a block of cells (a 2x2 block will do)
  5. Right click > Format Cells...
  6. Alignment Tab 
  7. Horizontal: Left (indent), Vertical: Top, then check the boxes for Wrap Text and Merge Cells
  8. Hit Okey Dokey
  9. The little macro window that is in the center of your screen has a stop button (square...) press it.
  10. Right click on your toolbar (the thing at the top with all the buttons ,P) and go to Customize...
  11. Make sure you are in the Commands tab then scroll down to Macros in the Categories pane (left side).
  12. Drag and drop "Custom menu item" onto the toolbar, where you would like our merge-wordwrap icon to go
  13. Do Not OK Out of the window yet!
  14. Right click on your newly created icon, at the bottom you will see "Assign Macro..." click it
  15. Select MergeWrap and hit OK
  16. Right click on our icon and click on edit button image. Now you get to draw in an image you like, I went with one long line across the top and a small downward arrow and a few short lines at the bottom. Note: I only used black, the rest is automatically transparent. Hit ok when you are done.
  17. Right click on our icon, Change the name to "Merge Wrap"
  18. Right click on our icon, click on Text Only (in Menus)
  19. Celbrate good times, come on!

Friday, November 7, 2008

My dumb excel mistake

If you accidentaly copy and paste a value into excel and try to interact with it you may get a #VALUE! error, you copied a space after your number accidentaly.
It's okay dumb dumb, I did it too.  >_<

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

CSS: Getting specific with lists

Cascading Style Sheets offer an opportunity to get specific with lists, and here is how:

To create a specific outcome solely for unordered list's (ul) items (li), as opposed to all list items (li) do the following

ul li { }

for all lists you would simply use

li { }

This can be applied specifically for your blogger account with the following markup:
example: from this website!
.post ul
{ margin:0; padding:0; }
.post ul li
{ line-height:1.5em; list-style:none; background:url("http://www.blogblog.com/scribe/list_icon.gif") no-repeat $startSide .3em; vertical-align:top; padding-top: 0; padding-$endSide: 0; padding-bottom: .6em; padding-$startSide: 17px; margin:0; }

The Results of the above code:
  1. This is an ordered list
  2. This is a second item
  • This is an unordered list
  • This is a second item

This same thought process can be applied to any set of sequential markup tags. Enjoy and code safely ,-)

Adding a signature

Microsoft Outlook Tutorial:

Automatically insert a signature in all new messages or in all messages that you reply to or forward

  1. From the main Microsoft Outlook window, on the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Mail Format tab.
  2. In the Compose in this message format list, click the message format that you want to use the signature with.
  3. Under Signatures, select an e-mail account, and then choose the signatures that you want to use for new messages and for replies and forwards. You can use a different signature for each.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Office '07 and docx

Since it isn't standard yet, here is how to have your new version of word (2007) save as a doc, instead of docx by default.

Tutorial: Changing the default file association from docx to doc
Source: Microsoft
  1. Click the Microsoft Office Button , and then click Word Options.

  2. Click Save.

  3. Under Save documents, next to Save files in this format, select Word 2003-97 Document (*.doc).
note: This process should be about the same for the other pieces of software in Office. Remember that when you change this you are saying, "even if I save this on my computer, just for me, it is going to put the file in a downgraded format." That said, when possible save as docx for yourself.

note2: Computers at the UD Library and many other sites have Office 2007 now.

Bonus Tutorial: Default font in Word '07
Source: Microsoft
  1. If your document already contains text that is formatted with the properties that you want to use, select that text. If you are starting from a blank document, go to step

  2. On the Home tab, click the Font Dialog Box Launcher, and then click the Font tab.


  3. Select the options that you want to apply to the default font, such as font style and font size. If you selected text in step 1, the properties of the selected text are set in the dialog box.

  4. Click Default, and then click Yes.
*image is taken from ms, but not bandwidth pirated :P