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under-the-bonnet technology

under-the-bonnet technology

Word Hacks

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Industrial-strength tricks for getting more out of Word

Microsoft Word is the world’s most popular word-processor – yet many people never use some of the powerful tools it has to offer. They might jiggle around with a few font choices and toolbar options, but there is a lot more under the bonnet which isn’t immediately apparent. Andrew Savikas’s new book Word Hacks offers tips and guidance for harnessing these hidden strengths. The tips are graded at beginner, moderate, and expert level – so you can work in a way which is comfortable for you. He starts off by telling you how to deal with all the menu options to make Word work as you want it to. Then it’s on to macros – a list of commands which you can store, to save you the problem of boringly repetitive keystrokes and menu choices. He also shows you how to hack your shortcut menus, and how to customise Word.

Word HacksThis ranges from trivial things such as changing the icons and buttons on your toolbars, to getting rid of the annoying and very unpopular Help assistant (Mr Paperclip). He then moves on to more useful tricks such as increasing the number of most recently used files (MRU) listed at the bottom of the File menu, and shows you how to mess with the number of font options available.

He shows you how to display samples of your fonts instead of just a list of their names; how to create bar graphs using tables; how to repeat a chapter heading across multiple pages; and how to increase the number of styles you can apply to footnotes ands captions.

Most of these tips only require you to type out a short macro (which he supplies) or to hack gently at the regular menu options. Any of the longer procedures are then saved as macros and assigned a keyboard shortcut of your choice.

You’ve probably noticed that Web addresses typed in Word turn automatically into hyperlinks – underlined and coloured blue. For those people (like me) who find this annoying, he shows you how to change the appearance and even get rid of them.

For serious and industrial strength writing he shows you how to do powerful search and replace edits, how to add custom (and temporary) dictionaries for special projects, how to take control of the way Word deals with bulleted lists, and how to make the most out of Word’s outlining feature.

There’s a whole chapter devoted to troubleshooting common Word problems – such as missing toolbars, repeated freezes and crashes, and the proliferation of unwanted temporary files. Then he finishes with some fairly advanced suggestions on forms and fields, plus how to get Word to perform calculations using tables, and using Word to work in XML and XSLT.

My guess is that this is one for people who like Word, who are committed to staying with it, and who want to get more from it in terms of power and productivity. It will also be useful to writers and editors working on book-length projects and reports. As usual with O’Reilly publications, the layout and presentation are impeccable.

© Roy Johnson 2004

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


Andrew Savikas, Word Hacks: Tips and Tools for Taming your Text, Sebastapol: CA, 2004, pp.372, ISBN: 0596004931


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Filed Under: Computers, Writing Skills Tagged With: Information design, Microsoft Word, Technology, Text editors, Word Hacks, Word-processors, Writing skills

YouTube: an insider’s guide

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

an insider’s guide to climbing the charts

YouTube didn’t start until 2005, but now it’s mainstream New Media. Why? Because it allows small time punters like you and me to upload video clips which – if they’re interesting enough – will be watched by millions of viewers. And that, if you work the system right, can be converted into a generated income. YouTube has gone from hobbyist niche to big business in just a few years. It was so successful, Google snapped it up for a cool $1.6 billion a year later, and now everyone from hobbyists and amateur daydreamers to semi-professional film makers is posting stuff up there – at the rate of ten hours of video every minute.

YouTube: an insider's guide If you’re not used to searching for stuff on YouTube, you’ll be amazed at the variety. There’s everything from instructional how-to films, reviews of new products, personal diaries, stand-up comedians, and extracts from movies, to recordings of live theatre and musical concerts. This is a book of technical guidance written by two insiders (or ‘Tubers as they call themselves) showing you how it’s done. They make their purpose very clear right from the start:

You don’t need money or corporate backing to go viral. You simply need a very good, or very bad, video and the know-how to get viewers to your video – both of which you will learn how to do in this book.

After a quick introduction they pitch straight into the main issue of how to make good short films – which is the very basic issue of storytelling. And the emphasis is on brevity. Your maximum upload is only ten minutes, but if you can’t make your point in two you’re dead.

Sometimes people get lucky and video their pet kitten just as it falls of a table chasing a fly, or they might capture a car just after the driver has turned up a one-way street. But these are just one-offs. This book assumes that you want to make regular short films until one gets you into the most-watched slot.

Actually, most of the instruction is already in the form of YouTube visual content. There are lots of clips available showing you how to direct and edit films. They also realistically assume that you want to do all this with minimum expense. That’s not a problem. You use yourself or your friends as actors, and you only need a cheap digital video camera. In fact professional film makers such as Mike Figgis and David Lynch already use them for creating full length feature films.

There’s also advice on microphones, lighting, props, background music, and of course editing. Then once you’ve got something to share, they show you how to create your own channel (profile) on YouTube, and how to customise it and start attracting viewers.

There’s a good chapter explaining the significance and differences between fair use, copyright, parody, remixes, and mashups – then on to the all important business of generating an audience. This can go from responding to visitor comments and participating in user groups and collaborative video projects, to all sorts of semi-legal and downright illegal hacks which can result in your account being suspended. YouTube does its best to make the popularity figures genuine for the materials it hosts.

The logical extension of all this is making money from your work – monetization if you want to use the current jargon. This can be done via YouTube’s partnership program or by running Google Ads. And finally, although they remain loyal ‘Tubers throughout, they end up by showing lots of alternative outlets where you can make your work available. There are also interviews with successful YouTubers who have gone viral and even landed jobs as the result of a two-minute spoof of some TV ad or pop promo.

© Roy Johnson 2008

YouTube   Buy the book at Amazon UK

YouTube   Buy the book at Amazon US


Alan Lastufka and Michael W. Dean, YouTube: an insider’s guide to climbing the charts, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2008, pp.281, ISBN: 0596521146


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Filed Under: Computers, Media, Publishing Tagged With: Communication, e-Commerce, Media, Publishing, Technology, YouTube

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