Get Rid of MS Office 2013 Animations

Some people like it, but I don't. MS Office 2013 introduces fluid animations to various actions. For example, in Excel, when you move from one cell to another the highlight box doesn't jump, but slides to the next box.

To get rid of all of these animations:

1. Right click on My Computer icon on the Desktop and choose Properties option OR just hit Win+Pause
2. In the System window click the Advanced system settings link in the left pane
3. Click Continue button if prompted by UAC
4. Now click Settings button under Performance section
5. Select the Custom and un-check the option Animate controls and elements inside windows to disable animations
6. Click OK button
7. Click OK button in the System Properties window

[Source: How To Code]

Pasting Plain Text

Often I want to paste plain text, without any formatting. There is usually a menu option to do this, such as in Word by clicking the Home tab, then clicking the little arrow under Paste, then clicking the Text button. Or you can right click, then choose Paste as text. Those aren't too bad, but if you do this action a lot you want something faster. You want a keyboard shortcut. 

I found a small application called PureText that accomplishes this task. It allows you to choose whatever keyboard shortcut you want and pastes plain text in any location.

You can get PureText here: http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/

This little app runs when Windows starts. The tray icon provides a way to access the options dialog:

As you can see from the image, I assigned the keyboard shortcut to Ctrl-Shift-V. Now I can use Ctrl-v to paste formatted text or Ctrl-Shift-V for plain text.

Enjoy!

Delay Sending Emails in Outlook

When you accidentally send an email there are several ways to prevent it from being delivered.

If you are using Outlook you can recall the message.
If you are using Gmail you can turn on delayed sending and "undo" the send.

But if you are using Outlook as a frontend for Gmail what can you do?

One solution is to apply a delay before sending all emails. This can be accomplished by the following procedure:

1. In Outlook, click Rules -> Manage Rules & Alerts.
2. Click New Rule.
3. Click Apply rule on message I send.
4. Click Next.
5. Click Yes in the window that asks if you want to apply it to all messages.
6. Check the box next to defer delivery by a number of minutes.
7. Click on a number of in the bottom window pane.
8. Set the number of minutes that you want to delay by, e.g. 1 minutes.
9. Click OK.
10. Click Next.
11. Give the rule a name, such as "Stop delivering stupid emails".
12. Click Finish.

All emails that you send are now delayed by 1 minute. If you realize your mistake you can go into the Outbox and delete the email.

[Source: HowToGeek]

Printing Comments for Adobe PDFs

For those of you who have Adobe Acrobat X, there is a nice way to create a PDF showing all of the comments in the document. The result uses a landscape orientation with the original page on the left side and a list of the comments on the right side. It also has arrows that connect the comments to the text in the original document.

How to create a document showing all comments:

1. Click Comment on the top-right.
2. If the comment list is not open, then click Comments List.
3. On the top-right of the Comments List pane, select Options --> Create Comment Summary.
4. In the window that opens, select the radio button next to Document and comments with connector lines on single pages.
5. Click Creat Comment Summary.
6. This creates a new PDF document that shows the comments.
7. Save the document.

[Source Adobe]

Get PDFs with non-Standard Fonts and Apple Preview to Display Correctly

A project that I am working on uses non-standard fonts in the documents (in this case Myriad Pro). The documents are in Microsoft Word and then saved as PDFs for distribution. After sending out one document I got feedback that users on Apple computers did not see any text when they opened the PDF with Preview. That's bad!

I looked around for a solution and found that Preview does not work well with Open Type fonts. The solution (at least until Apple fixes their OS) is to embed the fonts in the PDF.

If you have Adobe Acrobat, you can use this procedure to setup PDF creation:
1.    You must have Adobe Acrobat installed (not just Adobe Reader)
2.    Open the Word file