Category Archives: Tips ‘n Tricks

Excel: After pressing Enter, move selection …

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Some people may be aware of this, but in Excel you can change the default behavior of the Enter key. By default, when you hit Enter it will move one cell down. In Excel 2007 this setting is found in Office button > Excel Options > Advanced, and it allows you to select from Up, Down, Right, and Left.

Changing this setting is not necessary, however, as you can achieve all four directions with the default setting.

  • Down, this is the default behavior
  • Up, Shift-Enter
  • Right, Tab
  • Left, Shift-Tab

There are two more Enter-based keystrokes that come in handy from time to time.

  • Ctrl-Enter saves the cell data, and keeps that as the currently selected cell (read: does not move in any direction)
  • Alt-Enter will give you a new line (LFCR) within the same cell

Open From S/FTP Server

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If you do any kind of work that requires S/FTP, you know the hassle of marking up your local copy, saving, uploading, and checking the result. I know it drives me batty to have to do all of that up-and-down crap. And sure, I can use vi in the command shell, and I do regularly, but I find I’m much slower in vi than I am in a regular text editor. So I struggled with vi or the FTP up-and-down, until I found a great bit of functionality within my already chosen text editor on Mac.

I had been using TextWrangler for a while — mostly because it is a powerful text editor, with the added benefit of being free — before someone tipped me off to the ability to open and save files from within TextWrangler over S/FTP connections. I hadn’t ever considered that could be placed into software, but I found it to be a brilliant feature to a product I already considered to be of high quality. With TextWrangler, you open a FTP browser window, enter your S/FTP information (or pick from a saved bookmark), and connect. It’s a pretty basic FTP browser, but it doesn’t need to be super fancy.

Sure, it has its limitations. You need to have permissions to the file, and cannot use a SUDO command to gain super user access to edit it. Also, if you have to CHMOD or CHOWN you need to do that elsewhere. In full honesty, these are the only limitations I’ve come up against at this point, and maybe I’m not looking hard enough to find the way to do it. I’ve been using this functionality from TextWrangler for about a year now, and this is one of those simple, yet killer features that I will expect out of any future text editor I use.

Does anyone know of a text editor on the Windows or Linux platforms that provide similar functionality, because I’d sure like to give it a go on my other workstations.

Put It In a Space

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I was first introduced to virtual desktops about 6 years ago when I first started poking at Linux. At the time it was a hobby type thing so I was basically running one or two applications at a time, and I didn’t see any real practical use for it.

In the last 9 months I’ve been buried in a major software implementation at work, and I’ve been consistently running more applications than I previously had. My dual-monitor setup started to seem too cramped, and seeing that I am running Mac OS 10.5 (the Leopard), I decided to take a stab at Spaces, and man I’ve been happy with the results. I’ve settled on a 4-desktop arrangement.

My Virtual Desktop Arrangment

Space 1 (top left): Being the “first” desktop, I’ve got my two main applications there, email (Entourage) and web browser (Firefox).

Space 2 (top right): Second most desktop I’ve got my various IM clients. I use iChat and Skype primarily, but will dip into Adium on occasion.

Space 3 (bottom left): This is where I do most of my interchange of applications. Shown in the photo is TweetDeck, and I will also pull up Terminal, TextWrangler, Finder, Excel, Word, etc. as I need. This tends to be my catch-all space.

Space 4 (bottom right): Primarily my remote desktop desktop. I use CoRD to connect to Windows servers and computers. If I am not using a remote desktop there I’ll shift some stuff over from Space 3.

Here are some free Windows options for running virtual desktops if you’ve never tried it out: Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager, VirtuaWin, Microsoft PowerToys.

Do you use virtual desktops? How do you have it arranged?

Update: I realize I talked about my dual-monitor setup, and this screenshot was taken when I was not at my desk.

FF to Safari, pt. 2 – Import Bookmarks

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One thing that I was dreading about this Safari-for-a-week thing was having to manually copy over my bookmarks from Firefox.  There’s not much worse than wasting a bunch of time doing copy, paste, repeat.  A little Google search, and we have a winner!

If you’ve got Safari 2.0 (or higher) you’ve got import and export options in the File menu. Choose Import Bookmarks, then navigate to bookmarks.html in your Firefox profile (~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles) and click Import.  

Emphasis mine. So simple, yet almost too simple to believe. Time saved; color me happy.

Playtagger

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Bren, formerly of Slacker Manager fame, showed me this great little tip today. Playtagger is a feature brought to us by del.icio.us.

Play Tagger is a neat little tool that allows you to easily play mp3 files directly on del.icio.us (see the popular mp3 bookmarks), and you can have it for your website or blog too. Include this tiny javascript in your HTML, and your mp3 links will automatically become playable right on the page. In addition, your visitors will have the opportunity to easily tag and post the mp3 link to del.icio.us. This script is very lightweight, as is the flash movie that plays on demand.

Probably the most useful part is you can drag a link to your bookmark bar. If you are browsing a page with a link to a MP3 file, give that bookmark a click, and you will be able to play that MP3 inline on the page, rather than being required to download it. Very slick.

IM Down, Try Meebo

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My wife gave birth to our second son last week, so I was out of the office all week. I brought my laptop with me to the hospital so I would be able to dump photos from the camera if the memory card filled up. While in labor and getting settled into the room my wife noticed that one of the signs in the room made a statement about there being free wifi throughout the hospital — this hospital opened just over one year ago.

Yatzee! I was superexcited to have free wifi. It was great because I could upload photos to Flickr, and post to my personal blog from the hospital. It was really nice to be able to get the news out quickly to a geographically spread-out audience.

There were two hitches, though, one of which I was able to work around. Both hitches are related. Because of the security/firewall rules on the “guest” wifi network I was not able to connect to my corporate VPN — both good and bad that I couldn’t get much work done (mostly good) — and I couldn’t connect to IM. While I couldn’t get around the VPN issue, I was able to use Meebo to get IM working for me. I’ve used Meebo sparingly in the past — I prefer the “feel” of a desktop IM client — but found Meebo to be the perfect tool in the perfect situation.

Shortcut Key to Flag Mail in Outlook

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Another shortcut key discovered by accident. I was moving around my inbox with the keyboard, deleting messages, when I mis-keyed and hit Insert instead of Delete. Much to my pleasant surprise I found that Insert flagged the highlighted message with the default red flag. If you hit Insert on a message that is already flagged, it marks it as complete. This works with one, or many, messages highlighted.

To clear the flag completely, or to set a flag with a color other than the default color, you still need to go through the standard process. I’ve never risen to the level of using the various colors for flags, so I’m not hampered by the default action of this shortcut.

I’ve only tested this on Outlook 2003. Can anyone verify this with other versions of Outlook? How about Entourage?

USPS Says Forever…For First Ounce Only

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This is indirectly tech related, but generally not. :-) The USPS has gone and upped the postal rates from $0.39 to $0.41 for the first ounce on a first class letter. They’ve also introduced something known as the Forever Stamp. I received a word of warning/advise about the use of this new stamp.

In the past, if you knew that your letter was going to be over one ounce you could load up on stamps to cover the additional weight. An example is if you mail in your tax forms, that stack of pages weighs more than one ounce, so you’d stick two (or three) $0.39 stamps on it.

The Forever Stamp will only cover the first ounce. If you place two Forever Stamps on a letter you just wasted one of those stamps. To complete the example above, you would use one Forever Stamp, then add valued stamps ($0.41, $0.26, etc.) on to it to make the required postal rate.

Just to clarify even more, if you place 10 Forever Stamps on an envelope you just used 10 stamps to cover the first ounce, and have done nothing to cover the additional weight.

The indirect tech impact of all the changes to the USPS regulations is that, with all of the policy changes, rate hikes, new classification rules (what is a letter v. flat v. parcel), etc. people are going to greatly reduce their use of tradition mailing (read: USPS) and turn more towards technological delivery methods.

Re-open Closed Tab

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Bren posted about this a good while ago, but I get so much use out of it that I figured I’d spread it around again.

If you accidentally close a tab you can bring it back from the netherworld by hitting Shift+Cmd+T (on a Mac) or Shift+Ctrl+T (on Windows).

This is so incredibly helpful when you get overly close-happy with your tabs, and go too far. Or, in my case, if you just aren’t thinking, this will resurrect the results of your errant clicks.

Move Joomla! to a New Server

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My dad runs a Joomla! based website that I have been hosting. Just recently we decided to migrate it to a different web host, so I had to figure out how to move it.

I was initially puzzled by how to accomplish this move with the least amount of pain. I’ve enjoyed the slick Export/Import process that WordPress provides, and (to my knowledge) there is nothing like that for Joomla!. I decided the only way I was going to complete this was to export the MySQL database, and download all 2000+ Joomla! files from the old server, then upload the files and import the database to the new server. A little time consuming, but it guarantees that everything will be migrated.

Before I set out on this “journey” I decided to see if there were any guides online that had different methods. What I found was detailed steps of exactly what I was planning to do. Here is another guide (less detailed though) that I just had to link to, because it’s a Joomla! guide on a site running Drupal. Go figure.