Tips Archives

Using Photoshop — More Tips, Tricks, and Hints

Figured I’d mention a few other techniques which might be of use. Photoshop is almost a gold mine of cool tip after cool tip; I’d never deny it takes some practice to become comfortable with the program, so here’re some more. Tip 4. Always be …

Using Photoshop — Tips, Tricks, and Hints

Photoshop has been around for a while, and it’s a fairly sophisticated program, but there are some tips one can learn to work a little more efficiently no matter what your level of expertise. 1. A lot of the work we do in Photoshop depends …

Microsoft Word – 10 Features that will Improve Your Workflow

With so many features packed inside each Microsoft application, it’s easy to overlook some that can really add value to your daily workflow. Below is a list of some of the features you may have never noticed but will quickly become part of your daily routine.

Styles

Styles are not only a great time-saver, but they form the basis of a variety of other Word features.

Styles allow you to assign in bulk a variety of different formatting attributes, like font size, style, color, alignment, line spacing, borders, shades, indentation, etc… The list is quite voluminous. Once styles are applied to text, the text can then be bulk-updated simply by changing the style. If you modify the style, Word will automatically apply the change to all text whose appearance was created from the style. Imagine the time saved when making minor alterations like changing the font size of all headings. Change the style and all of the headings are updated to match.

Once you have your styles in place, you can now also navigate more effectively through your document via the Navigation Pane. Any text formatted with a heading style will appear as a list entry. This will become one of the greatest time-savers when navigating large documents.

12 Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Every User

Keyboard shortcuts are a great way to improve the speed at which documents are built, regardless of the application. It seems like there is a keyboard shortcut for just about every feature Excel contains; and there may be that one guru in the office that knows them all. But most of us fall somewhere between Guru and Labrador retriever (hopefully, closer to the former.)

The good news is that it’s not an “all or nothing” proposition when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. Knowing just a few of the most productive keyboard shortcuts will serve you far better than knowing none at all.

So let’s get this show on the road!

CTRL+SHIFT+L – Turn On/Off Filter Controls

Filters are of tremendous use when analyzing large numbers of records in a table, but you are only interested in a select set of records that met a specific criteria. Activating your filters is just a CTRL-SHIFT-L away. This keyboard can also be used to turn off all of the filters and display the entire list. (Filters are on by default when you convert a straight table to a Data Table, and not always desired.) Finally, if you hit the “L” key twice (CTRL-SHIFT-L & L) you can effectively clear the current filters to start fresh with a new filter query.