Insert a line above a Word table at the top of the page
January 27, 2009 by wizTEQ Staff
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If you’ve ever gotten stuck trying to add text above a table at the beginning of a document, this tip’s for you — and you won’t believe how easy it is.
You’ve just created a table beginning on the first line of the first page of your document. After you’ve completed your table, shown in Figure A, you decide to add a caption above it.
Figure A
But when you try clicking the mouse above the table, the mouse keeps positioning itself in the first cell of the table, not above it. You could insert an extra row above the first to give yourself a place to type, but then you would have to remove the borders and merge the cells after typing the caption. Fortunately, you don’t need to do all that formatting. Simply follow these steps to insert a blank line above the table:
- Click in the upper left-hand corner of the first cell in the first row (before any text).
- Press the Enter key.
Word inserts a line above the table and positions the mouse pointer at the beginning of the line, where you can now type the caption (Figure B).
Figure B
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Create unmirrored Photo Booth movies
January 27, 2009 by wizTEQ Staff
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Although Photo Booth 2.0.3 allows one to flip (Command-F) previously captured photos and auto-flip (Shift-Command-F) new photos to an unmirrored — “correct,” some would say — orientation, the application makes no such provision for movies made with Photo Booth. Other applications, such as QuickTime Pro and iMovie, do create unmirrored video, but lack the real-time access to image effects that Photo Booth provides.
A recent question in the macosxhints forums, and some similar posts in Apple forums, sent me in search of a Photo Booth solution. It turned out to take only a small tweak to one Quartz composition inside the Photo Booth application package to produce unmirrored movies. Note that to edit the Quartz composition, you’ll need Xcode installed.
- Make a backup of Photo Booth so that you can return easily to the application’s original behavior if desired.
- Control-click on the Pho…
Create keyboard shortcuts for stubborn Cocoa apps
January 27, 2009 by wizTEQ Staff
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If you’re missing a keyboard shortcut for a menu item in one of your apps, and the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane doesn’t get you anywhere, you can use Interface Builder to assign one. It’s easy.
As an example, I’ve added a shortcut to the View » Sort Subscriptions By » Unread Count menu item in NetNewsWire, since I like to have my feeds sorted by the number of unread posts while I’m reading them. I got fed up with always having to choose it from its buried sub-menu via the mouse.
You need Interface Builder for this hint, and it’s part of Xcode (formerly Developer Tools) that you can download for free from Apple after you’ve registered as an ADC member, which is also free. This hint involves digging into the application’s contents, so if you’re afraid you might break something, it’s probably best to make a backup of the application. However, any change made with IB is easily…
Use Xbench to fix screen burn-in
January 27, 2009 by wizTEQ Staff
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Here’s a novel use of Xbench, akin to using “Skin So Soft” as a greenie bug repellant on the New Jersey shore: Use Xbench to fix screen burn-in.
I was away for winter break, and my iMac froze shortly after I left, with the Flurry screensaver running. It froze for a month, and burned a swirl into the upper middle of my iMac screen. I normally have a solid blue desktop; it looked after this like a piece of blue cardboard that had gotten bent, and was a deeper blue along the crease. This persisted for days.
Does your head ever make you want to scratch it from the inside? I felt this way about my iMac display, no amount of pressure from the outside would help, what was needed was some serious scratching from the inside. So I downloaded Xbench, ran the Quartz Graphics Test, and quickly moved the window to the location of my screen trouble. I repeated this perhaps a dozen times, and I can no longer see any trace of the problem.
Easily combine images into a single document
January 27, 2009 by wizTEQ Staff
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I often need to combine a number of .jpg images into a single document. Regrettably, the Windows world always seems to do this by creating a presentation, but I prefer to keep PDF files instead as they are quicker to open. A number of hints have discussed this task, but all that I have seen seem to require specialised software or scripting or both.
In OS X, the easiest way is to open the images in Preview, click in the thumbnail tray, choose Edit->Select All, then File->Print Selected Items. In the print dialog, choose the PDF button, then select the Save as PDF-X item. You’ll be asked where to save the file, and you’re done.
Another way, if you have Keynote from iWork, is to drag the images onto Keynote’s slide thumbnail pane, select all of them, then export them as a PDF. This way, you can also export them as a presentation if you prefer.
Incidentally, if you receive Powerpoint documents that you’d prefer to store as, say, PDF documents instead, ju…
Share different chart fills across iWork ’09 apps
January 27, 2009 by wizTEQ Staff
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Strangely, in iWork ’09 the different apps do not have the same color fills available for making charts. Keynote has one set, while Pages and Numbers have a different set. At first sight, therefore, it would seem like one cannot make a chart in Keynote that uses the Marble fill (since that is only available in Pages and Numbers), nor a Numbers chart that uses the Retro fill. But it can be done!
For this example, we will make a chart in Pages that uses a fill from Keynote.
Open Pages and Keynote. Make a new chart in each app. Open the Inspector panel in both apps, and select the Charts tab (making sure the chart is still selected). Next, click on the Chart Colors button in Keynote. This will show the available chart fills in a floating palette. Now arrange your windows so that you can see both Keynote’s chart fills palette, and your Pages chart — minimizing the Keynote window is a good way to do this. Do not switch to Pages, as this will cause Keynote’s fl…
Create functions in Numbers ’09 using the keyboard
January 27, 2009 by wizTEQ Staff
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As a long-time Excel user, one of the things that annoyed me about Numbers ’08 was that you couldn’t completely create functions using the keyboard. Sure, you could start typing =MID(, for instance. However, as soon as you needed to enter a cell reference, you had to reach for the mouse, even if the cell you wanted to reference was located right next to the formula you were typing. The arrow keys would only move the cursor within the typed text, not around the worksheet to select cells.
When I first started using Numbers ’09, I thought this was still the case — because that’s all the arrow keys seem to do in this version, too. But here’s the secret solution, which isn’t documented in the User Manual nor in the Keyboard Shortcuts list available in Help: Hold down the Option key before pressing the arrow keys (this won’t work in Numbers ’08). With the Option key down, you can then move around the active table and select cells using just the keyboard. Release …
10.5: Keep ‘Apple Mail To Do’ off IMAP accounts in Mail
January 27, 2009 by wizTEQ Staff
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Do you dislike the “Apple Mail To Do” entry in your IMAP mail account in Mail? Disabling this ‘feature’ has been claimed many times in many places, but I finally found a way that actually works:- Quit Mail
- open ~/Library » Preferences » com.apple.mail.plist using Property List Editor.
- Scroll down to the Mail Accounts entry and open it (click the arrow to the left of it).
- Click the arrow to the left of Item 1.
- Make sure the AccountType is LocalAccount (if it’s not, one of the other Items is, but it should be Item 1).
- Copy the string value of the uniqueId field (the string of letters and numbers and dashes).
- Scroll down to the NewNoteToDoAccount entry, and paste the local account ID string in as its value.
Be sure you delete t…
Calculate values in a PivotTable report
January 27, 2009 by wizTEQ Staff
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Learn about the different calculation methods that are available in PivotTable and PivotChart reports.
Microsoft Excel Tips
January 27, 2009 by wizTEQ Staff
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Visit this blog to learn about a few tips and tricks for using Excel 2007.