Vista photo gallery for XP users

Microsoft included a nice photo gallery in Vista but that hasn't been enough to persuade me to leave the familiar and now pretty reliable XP environment. In fact Google's Picasa has been my application of choice for locating, previewing, simple editing and sharing the thousands of photos I've accumulated for several years now. The excellent team at Media Player development, though, seem to have had some input and helped create a pretty good gallery application for Microsoft and it may not be generally appreciated that you can have the Vista-style gallery on your XP operating system.

Access the beta version here. Beware of the other bits and pieces that they try and get you to install at the same time. Their blog writer may be worth playing with (I'll give that a try and report separately) but you're unlikely to want Windows Live as your default search engine and certainly won't want your default home page changed to whatever they offer.

Thanks to Dr Steve North, of Windows Adviser fame, for this tip.

Excel hyperlink color colours

There I was, actually doing something to get a bit more organised at the start of term in the shape of a timetable for my teaching when I hit a problem that had me scratching my head. Finished up having to look on various forums to get the answer so here's the problem and the solution which may save you a few hours one day!

For some reason best known to me I had used blue blocks for various lessons with white text. To make life simple I put hyperlinks on the text so that clicking a lesson would take me to the appropriate register. Of course, the text turns blue and gets underlined and is virtually invisible. Or it goes purple as a 'visited' link.




Ok, that'll be easy to fix, I say to myself. Uh-uh. Tried almost every menu. Tried the Microsoft help files but I seldom get much joy there anyway. Thought about the PCAdvisor forums but they don't have an obvious Excel place. Normally I would have popped into Woody's Lounge but that's under some redevelopment and temporarily off-line. Eventually I find Vastly Important Notes blog by Phil Libin and get the answer. Another addition to my favourites list.

You need Format | Styles and there you can change Hyperlink and Followed Hyperlink colours (or colors in MS speak).



That's better!

An Englishman abroad?

Just noticed how widespread all you people are - OK Britain still has the biggest blob and USA the highest number but lots of you have been coming from all sorts of other interesting places. Now, I'm on holiday for a month or two . . . so, come on, tell me where you are and why I should or shouldn't head in that direction over the summer. Leave a message on skype|: andrewx.com or e-mail me.

How do you do?

This may not work but it's worth a try. I've created a StudyZone page where you can post your own questions, preferably about things to do with ICT.

You may not get any answers but, there again, you may. Who knows. You won't know until you try.

Here's the link. I've used a pbwiki page as they're pretty cool and do what I want them to, generally.

http://studyzone.pbwiki.com/HowDoI

Look! I've got 43 slides in my presentation . . .

. . . and you wonder why people look bored before you've even started! I keep saying this but still find loads of people who really should know better starting off their presentations by opening PowerPoint and there, laid bare before us all, is this display of n slides (where n is usually a very large number!)

Even if you've got this cool show organised and even if the slides themselves have a nice design and combination of text and images that aren't distorted, your audience will be thinking about the other 42, 41, 40, 39 and doze off for a while.

Don't do this!! Put the show together and then save it as a PowerPoint show. It's dead easy. You then get a .pps file which you can stick on the desktop or wherever. Open that when you're ready and Zapp! The first slide appears, full screen, with no clue to the tedium to follow.

It's been that time of year again when everyone gets staff-developed. Yawn. I was amazed to see so little improvement in presenters' skills after all this time but there again, none of them had turned up to my sessions this year. Probably the worst offender was one PowerPoint slide that had a large but very fuzzy image of something to do with College. It was obviously an image nicked from Google images but looked as though they had just found the image and copied the small version and pasted it in. Next time - get the real, proper size image from the site, save it and add it to the slide. And do check the size. If you have to stretch it afterwards then you need a bigger, better quality image in the first place and, frankly, Google images isn't the place to get them anyway.

If people put a bit more effort into the slide preparation then what they've got to say would usually get listened to a lot more.

Why do you want to use PowerPoint?

Some notes on using PowerPoint are now available, with illustrations from an XP2003 version, probably the most used at the moment and with significant differences from the old 97 style notes. Of course now I'll start getting requests for 2007 which I haven't even seen myself yet. Anyway the complete set and some tasks will be released via the Studyzone wiki as an experiment. I'll also publish them on either a site or a blog too but, at 22 pages, that's not as easy as it sounds! here's the first page, though. The rest at this link.

• Presenting information as you might have done with OHTs in the old days
• Supporting a speech or lecture – bullet points reminding you of what to say
• Displaying images in a big way
• A slide show (literally)
• A simple way to create graphics

Getting started

• Plan what you want to put on the slides (which will be different to, and much less than, what you want to say!)Start, end and middle etc. Find the images you might need and save them somewhere. If you intend to use links to web sites, store them as Favourites or Bookmarks
• Use the defaults. Leave the fonts alone. Type where suggested. Ignore all the designs and groovy backgrounds (at least until the content is finished)
• Use supplied slide layouts. Don’t add your own text areas to a blank slide unless all your doing is a picture show.
• Use a Master slide for anything that needs to appear on every slide (like a corporate logo, name, date etc.

more

When's a good time to . . .

Biorythms. Hmmm. Maybe you think they're a load of nonsense and will immediate scroll off somewhere else or wonder why on earth I'm taking so long to come up with those PowerPoint notes. If you're still here, Google have a nice little gadget that can sit on your desktop and indicates when your emotional senses, physical state or intelligence might be at a peak or trough, based on the assumption that each varies over time in a sine wave fashion. If nothing else, it might help explain why some days are just plain lousy!

Get it here

You can also see at a glance how old you are. You can also do that in Excel quite simply.
Type you date of birth in cell A1. In another cell type =NOW()-A1. That'll give you a funny date. Use Format|Cell to change the display to a Number, General to get the number of days.