Maybe you’re at a friend’s house using their PC to check your fantasy football or maybe you’re at home shopping for that perfect gift for your wife’s birthday. There are many reasons to secure and keep your web surfing private. This easy keyboard shortcut keeps your business and web surfing from peaking eyes. Easily start your browsing session InPrivate. Here’s how. Open Internet and Hold Ctrl + Shift + P. Where’s that Easy Button?
Whether it’s a power outage or user error, we’ve all closed out of a document without saving it only to find out later we need it back. In Office 2010 you can!
If the document was never saved, go to the File tab, click Recent and then at the bottom right of the window click Recover Unsaved Documents. In the dialog box that pops ups, select the document you want to restore by looking at the date modified. This will open a draft, which should be saved immediately.
If the document was saved at one point but only some changes were lost, go to File and then Recent and look for the When I closed without saving tag below your file names.
PLEASE NOTE: AutoRecover is set to every 10 minutes but can be changed by going to File, Options and then Save.
Video Tip: Tired of digging around your hard drive to show off your photographs? Need a more organized and visually attractive way to keep them. This video will show you how to use Microsoft PowerPoint as a digital photo album!
Product: Microsoft Excel Duration: 60 Minutes Date: December 21, 2011Time: 1:00 PM EST (US) Price: Free, with code LOB10
Our 60 minute Excel Tips and Tricks Webinar will help you eliminate the anxiety
of data analysis and will help you harness the true power of Excel! In this
Webinar, you will uncover incredible data analysis tools that were created
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After one hour with our expert, you’ll be able to:
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A slow internet connection can really hamper your productivity. Here are a few short tips to speed up your connection, and productivity!
1. Compress files WinZip is one of the most common compression tools. When sending multiple files, compression reduces their combined size, allowing your email to send faster.
2. Turn off your browser’s graphics Webpages may load more slowly if they contain many graphics. By turning off graphics through your browser’s internet options, you will be viewing text only. Disabling animation, sound, and video received from the web will make it easier for the page to load.
3. Simplify your signature Email signatures are a distinctive way to leave a professional mark on your messages. Bulky signatures with too many graphics can slow down your email. Make your signature more streamlined by combining fonts, type sizes, and colors. This type of signature is not only smaller, but quicker to send and receive. Microsoft Outlook has great features to guide you through this process.
We all could benefit from tools to help keep our inbox from becoming cluttered and unruly. This new feature deletes older messages from a conversation while preserving the newest instance in the thread. Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about lost details because Outlook looks at the content of emails and deletes earlier messages that have duplicate content but will not delete messages with attachments.
To use this feature you must first turn on the Conversation View by going to the View tab and then checking the Show as Conversations button.
To later clean up a conversation, right click on the latest message in the thread, right click and choose Clean Up Conversation.
To use the default settings click Clean Up. To adjust or view the Clean Up settings, go to the File tab and click Options. Go to the Mail tab and go to the Conversation Clean Up region.
Microsoft Powerpoint 2010 features great tools to allow the user to create an eye-catching presentation.
1. Create a Theme
Microsoft Office introduced themes in Microsoft Office 2007 and they remain a popular feature in the 2010 version as well. Themes allow the user to create a consistent type font, graphic effects, and color scheme throughout Microsoft Powerpoint presentations, Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Play around with themes in the Design tab.
2. Insert Videos or Audio
Recorded narration can enhance the flow of your presentation. Insert a brief video to expand upon the point of your presentation and it is embedded automatically with Powerpoint 2010. Video trim, fades and effects help to incorportate your video seamlessly into the presentation.
3. Use Graphics
Well-placed charts and diagrams can sometimes express more to your audience than bulleted points. If Microsoft Excel is installed on your computer, click the Chart icon to produce a diagram and insert it into your slide. If you are using a theme, the chart will match it automatically.
Make your Windows Live account soar into the clouds! By taking advantage of cloud computing, files can be stored in drives that are secure, have ample space and can be accessed from anywhere. Windows Live offers SkyDrive, an online file storage system that allows for easy management of your documents and favorite web links. To best utilize this service, we’ve outlined the steps required to create folders in SkyDrive for easy navigation and organization of your data.
Here we go:
1. Open a browser and go to www.live.com and sign in to windows live.
2. Click “SkyDrive” at the top of the screen.
3. Welcome to your SkyDrive! From here you can manage, add and remove data, and share documents with other Windows Live users. A toolbar at the top called “create” includes icons for MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Folder. Click the folder icon to create a new folder. Click into an existing folder and click the create folder icon to generate subfolders.
4. Type a name for your folder. By default, this new folder is private. Click “Change” if you wish to adjust sharing permissions.
5. Click “Next”.
6. By clicking select documents from your computer you may add data to you new SkyDrive folder at this time. When you’re ready, click the continue button. Now you are viewing the contents of the new folder. Navigating back to SkyDrive will display all of the folders in your own little piece of the cloud for easy document storage, management and sharing.
Have you ever wanted to blur the background of a photo but you don’t want to use Photoshop? In the video below we show you just how to do this. We’ve also provided a step by step process below. This is an awesome photo technique in PowerPoint. It’s a technique that many designers have been doing in Photoshop. If you don’t have Adobe Photoshop you can still apply this effect. You do need to have Office 2010 (or 2011 for the Mac).
To begin you will need to choose a photograph, the best option is one that has people or an object as the main photo but has a distracting background that you would like to blur out, one that has a depth of field is ideal. For this technique you will use these functions in PowerPoint, Copy and Paste or the Duplicate Command, Background Removal and Artistic Effects.
Step by Step:
1.) Choose your photo. Again one with depth of field is ideal.
2.) Duplicate your image, you can select your image and copy and paste using the Ctrl-C (Copy) and Ctrl-V (Paste) keyboard shortcuts.
3.) Next align your two images. Click your Format Tab, select the Align option, then Align Left and Align Top.
4.) Select your foreground image. The best way to confirm you are selecting the correct images is to click on Select on your ribbon bar and choose Selection Payne. You will now see everything listed on this particular slide. You can rename the selections foreground and background. Select your foreground image, on the format tab select Remove Background option and the select Keep Changes.
5.) Select the background image, Select Artistic Effects and choose Blur.
This is a great video from Ron Owens from the Microsoft Word Blog. Ron shows us how to use the co-authoring (simultaneous editing) tool in Word 2010. He notes that you can “Cut your all-nighter in half”. He’s not kidding! This video also highlights how authors can be in different locations utilizing SkyDrive, Microsoft’s Cloud storage solution. Our two cents, at just under three minutes this is a great video and worth the watch.
