Announcements

Ahh, Back To School...

Well, as a teacher, I find myself at school again and can officially say goodbye to summer. I started work yesterday and I guarantee that even as you read this I'm at work either sitting through or leading some sort of professional development session. The kids are due in on Monday.

How many days left until Thanksgiving? :)

Enjoy your day,

April

Ohh, do we have an AWESOME deal this week!!

I Love This Program!

We have Microsoft Picture It Publishing (Gold edition) on sale for only $19.97 - with FREE US SHIPPING! This retails for $59.95, so you save over 66%!!

Now, you know I've looked at a lot of different desktop publishing packages over the years, and this 6 CD set is one of the best by far. It's super-easy to use and you can create about anything your heart desires. In case you can't tell, YES, I'm really excited about this one!

You can create greeting cards, e-mail cards, calendars, newsletters, web pages, invitations, announcements, labels, animated greetings, business cards, flyers, signs, stationary, T-shirts, stickers, web photo albums, party sets, recipe cards, awards, certificates, banners, and tons more. (whew) The thing includes over 12,000 different templates!

You can use your own photos or choose from over 150,000 different clipart images that are included with the package! You don't need to worry about finding that perfect image anymore!

This also includes powerful photo editing tools. Remove red-eye, cut people out of photos and put them somewhere else (very cool feature), adjust brightness / contrast, add frames to your photos, turn color to B&W, and choose from 150 different special effects that turn your photos into fine art prints! Oh, you can even print multiple photos on a single page (we've had a lot of requests for that).

Putting a project together couldn't be easier. Just choose the type of project you want, then follow the prompts. You're guided through step by step. Of course, you can also go into "do it yourself mode" and create projects from scratch if you prefer.

One of the coolest features this program has is helpful little movies that show you how to do basic operations. Regular help files are good, but learning by watching is best!

I could go on and on about this one, but since the web site has so much info, I'm just going to encourage you to go check it out. Here's the link:

http://www.worldstart.com/store/pictureitpublishing.htm

Don't miss out - we know this is going to be a very hot seller! Remember, we have our 30 day satisfaction guarantee - if you don't agree it's as good as I say it is, you can return it (even opened) for a prompt and courteous refund! You have nothing to lose!

MS Office 101

Just "Cruising" Through The Day

Have you ever heard anyone refer to "cruising" when working in a program?

Were you wondering what in the world they were talking about? (I'm sure you figured it out that it had nothing to do with cars.)

Well, for many people, "cruising" on the computer means to slide through the menus in a program looking at the choices listed.

There are some people who can remember a million different key combinations to accomplish almost any task. Then there are people who use menus so much they can recite the locations of options to you as though they were reading directions - without ever seeing the monitor!

And then there are those of us who know that a program can do a particular thing but can't seem to remember how to get to it. These are the people we find "cruising" the menus most often. They simply move the mouse pointer back and forth through the menus looking for the right option or something to trigger their memory.

So there you have it - a new kind of cruising. (One that's definitely far more productive than the traditional cruising and bores me a lot less.)

Office Tip of the Day

Taking Control of Your Menus

Here's the scenario -

You're cruising through the menus in an MS Office program (version 2000 or newer). Maybe you've even upgraded recently. Anyway, you're looking for that really cool thing you did a few months ago. Unfortunately, you can't seem to find the right menu choice and you can't remember exactly what you did the last time.

Suddenly you realize that your menus seem to be really short. Where are all of those other options anyway?

Believe it or not, I get a lot of emails where people aren't able to find all of their menu choices after they've upgraded to MS Office 2000 or XP. They know stuff is missing but they're not sure where to find it.

So, what did they do with all that stuff anyway?

Well, do you see the little double arrow pointing down at the end of each menu?

Click on it. Do you see the entire menu now?

Basically what they've done is shortened the menus to include some basic stuff and anything you've used recently. So as you use the entire menu to access more choices, the options you actually click on will be added to the list of items seen without using the double arrows.

OK - that's great, but what if you don't feel like using the double arrows time and time again? What if you're a "cruiser" who needs to see the whole list to remind yourself where to go? What then?

Is there any way to restore your menus to the way you're used to seeing them?

The answer is yes, of course - but how?

To take a look at your menu options we'll need to go to the Tools menu, Customize choice. In the Customize window you'll need to go to the Options tab.

The top portion of the window should now contain a section called Personalized Menus and Toolbars.

In this section, you have a couple of check boxes at your disposal. One of them should read "Menus show recently used commands first". Then below that there should be a check box for an option to "Show full menus after a short delay".

These two options control the new way the menus are behaving.

The first option, "Menus show recently used commands first", when checked is what creates the shortened menus and the double arrows at the bottom of the menus.

If you uncheck this box then your menus will show all options all the time. (In other words, you're back to the way they were in previous versions of MS Office.)

If you leave the first option checked then you have another decision to make regarding menu behavior. The second checkbox, "Show full menus after a short delay," will tell the program to display an entire menu (without clicking on the double arrow) if you let the mouse pointer sit on the menu. It takes a few seconds to trigger the full menu using this method, but if you're patient then it is an option.

If you uncheck this second box then the menus will stay shortened until you click on the double arrow.

There you go - just a little bit of menu control... They wouldn't want to give us too much control - just a little bit. ;-)