No matter how much space is on your hard drives, there’s always going to be the wishful desire in all of us that they could be just a little bit roomier. We fill them up with so much junk that it’s hard to believe we once made do with sub-gigabyte hard drives in the not-so-distant past. Now terabytes and multi-terabytes aren’t uncommon, and they don’t cost arms, legs, or even pinkie fingers (unless you’re buying from the suspicious-looking but well-dressed computer shark down by the docks and you miss a payment, but then you’ve probably got bigger problems than trying to squeeze every last bit of storage out of your hard drives).
But let’s pretend that you’re not trading off digits or kneecaps for your tech and that you’re keeping those hard drives organized with partitions. In the past, if you wanted to shrink a volume to make room for a new partition, you had to use third party tools. The Disk Management Tool in Windows 7 now includes a utility that lets you easily shrink a volume. The following tip shows you how to use the Disk Management tool in Windows 7 to shrink a volume.
Your first step is to open the Disk Management tool. Simply click Start, and type diskmgmt.msc in the Search box.
Right click the diskmgmt.msc entry and click Run As Administrator. The Disk Management Tool opens.
Within the Disk Management tool, right click the volume that you want to shrink. Select Shrink Volume from the menu. The Disk Management tool analyzes the volume and presents the Shrink window.
Use the up and down arrows beside the Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB: field to select the amount of space to shrink.
Next, click the Shrink button at the bottom of the window.
When Windows 7 finishes shrinking the volume, you have a new unallocated partition. You can use the unallocated partition to create a new volume.
Any Web designer knows that clients don’t always understand the effort that goes into getting their work just right, and making big changes in the middle of a project can cause problems ranging from lost time and money (in a best case scenario) to ill will, bruised egos, and tarnished resumes in small, professional circles where word of mouth is often treated as gospel. In a perfect world, we’d all get along and be understanding when things don’t go quite as planned, and try to see things from the other person’s side (and hope they’ll have a likewise spectacular attitude). Since we all know darned well that the world’s anything but perfect, finding a way for technology to serve as a go-between seems like an ideal, 21st century way to solve the problem.
Imagine that you’re a designer and you’re about to present your latest work to your client. For some of you this may not be very hard to imagine because design work is a part of what you do each and every day. When you present the work, you want it to be presented in the best possible way. Not only do you want the client to get a good idea of what the design actually looks like, but you also want to make it easy for them to share their feedback with you. A service called Recurse will get you headed in the right direction.
Many designers just share their design as an image attachment, but Recurse enables you to make the design feel real to the client by displaying it in a way that emulates a Web site. When you create a project, you’ll develop a project index that can be shared with the client so that they can see where you’re going with different parts of the design elements for a project. Commenting is also supported, which means that you’ll be able to get into the mind of the client and react accordingly.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone say that they opened a Word document included as an attachment within an email, edited the document, and clicked Save. When they re-opened the document within the email, their changes were not saved. Let’s just say that the number of times I’ve heard this is countless.
I added one more to that countless number when my mother called the other night in a panic. She had worked on editing a Windows Mail attachment for two hours, saved it, and now her changes were gone. So off I went to see what she had done this time.
I discovered that she received an email with a Word attachment. She opened the document from within the email and proceeded to edit it. When she was finished, instead of doing a Save As, she simply clicked Save. Her assumption was that her changes would be saved and she could just forward the email back to the recipient. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
What many people don’t realize is that when you open an attachment, such as a Word document, within Windows Mail, it is opened as a temporary file in the temp folder. Once you are done editing the document, even though you click Save, the document reverts back to the original version as soon as you close it. You must save the attachment to your computer if you want to save your changes!
Of course, someone sending a file in Word .doc format could be kind and tell the recipient that such saves won’t work, or send it in a completely different format (such as .rtf or .txt) to preempt this problem. In response to this post, Gnomie Stan wrote to bring up some very good points (republished here in hopes that others may learn from them):
Actually, you should never email a word doc.
You should never open a word document emailed to you.
Do not keep any Word docs that have been emailed to you in your email client.
Word is not a program meant to sent documents over the Web.
If you must send a doc from Word, send it as an .rtf (rich text file).
Microsoft Word files are a security hazard. Unlike standard data formats, Word files can contain programming code which can be executed by your computer automatically when a document is opened. Microsoft’s motivation for including this “feature” in Word was to allow word processing macros to be saved along with the document. However, it was not long before malicious people began exploiting this design flaw by writing Word macro code to surreptitiously delete random files or otherwise damage one’s computer. As a result, Word files are now notorious as the vector for dozens of computer viruses. When you receive a Word attachment by email, do you really want to take the risk of welcoming a proverbial Trojan horse into your system?
In cases where the document makes use of special formatting and you expect the recipient to edit it, you may wish to send an .rtf file instead of a Word file. .rtf was developed as a standard data interchange format for word processors, and most popular word processors can read and write such files. .rtf may not preserve physical formatting exactly, but unlike with HTML, it at least tries to specify physical presentation rather than leaving it entirely up to the recipient’s application.
Do you work for a company where social media is used frequently by colleagues to organize, advertise, and enhance the work at hand in a positive manner? Or has a system been installed that just sort of flopped and never took off either because people didn’t like the idea of change or the novelty just wore off before its potential was realized?
Many people are of the opinion that if a business installs social media tools (Web / Intranet) that staff will naturally start using it. However, these people fail to see that getting people to use social media tools requires a significant change in management effort. In fact, installing the tools in the easy part — getting people to use them is the challenge. Without a change management plan, there is a very good chance that any social media initiative will never get far off the ground.
So what does the change management plan need to include?
Executive-level sponsorship: Make sure any executives are on-board with the initiative and promoting the tools through conversation and active participation.
Communication plan: Getting employees to buy-in to Web 2.0 requires a significant amount of communication. Utilize any mediums available to promote the tools and the benefits they bring to an organization.
Engaging content: Conversations should be relevant to employees and should draw them into the online community.
Governance model: Social media tools require some sort of governance model both at the strategic and operation levels.
Policy: Employees need to know the rules for using the social media tools. A social media policy should explicitly define what employees can and cannot do within the environment.
Getting your company’s staff to start using social media likely isn’t something that will happen overnight. Don’t let a slow takeoff completely derail your efforts — keep it a positive experience and reward those who take initiative to use the system, and it will catch on. Have patience!
In the following tip, you’ll learn how to consolidate data from multiple worksheets in Excel 2010.
One of the fabulous features of Excel 2010 is that you can consolidate data from separate worksheets to create a summary and report on results. Why would you want to consolidate data? It makes it much easier to analyze, update and summarize the data when it’s consolidated into one worksheet.
Let’s take a look at a specific example. Many people use excel worksheets to track expense figures. You might expense figures for each office in different worksheets. You can consolidate the data to roll the expense figures up into a single expense report that provides an overall summary.
The Consolidate Data feature in Excel 2010 lets you pull records from multiple worksheets into one master worksheet, which adds up all the data. There are two ways that you can consolidate data: consolidate by position and consolidate by category.
You would consolidate by position when the data from multiple worksheets is arranged in the same order and uses the same row and column labels. You would consolidate by category when the data from multiple worksheets is arranged differently, but the same row and column labels are used.
To consolidate data by position in Excel 2010, start by opening the worksheets that you want to consolidate. Open a new worksheet and give it a suitable name. Within the new worksheet, click the Data tab. Within the Data Tools group, click the Consolidate command.
The Consolidate window appears. Select the appropriate option from the Function drop down list. For example, if you want to show a sum of values for the consolidation, select the Sum option. Next, use the Browse or Add button to select the worksheets that you want to consolidate. Under ‘Use labels in’ select where the labels are located in the source ranges (select either Top row, Left column or both). Click OK.
The values are consolidated into one master worksheet.
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I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone say that they opened a Word document included as an attachment within an email, edited the document, and clicked Save. When they re-opened the document within the email, their changes were not saved. Let’s just say that the number of times I’ve heard this is countless.
Do you work for a company where social media is used frequently by colleagues to organize, advertise, and enhance the work at hand in a positive manner? Or has a system been installed that just sort of flopped and never took off either because people didn’t like the idea of change or the novelty just wore off before its potential was realized?
