The conundrum of crossing Dublin without passing a pub was solved in recent years, and described in some detail here.
For the modern age, surely the equivalent question must be whether it’s possible to cross Dublin without passing a Starbucks? Anyone solved that one yet? Do let me know!
I quite enjoy whiling away the odd bit of free time creating my own templates, page layouts, and the like. It’s a side effect of the whole tech comms thing. But an odd bit of free time doesn’t tend to coincide with an urgent need for a printable resource.
The internet, though, is a mad place of infinite wonder and abundent with lovely printables/downloadables that someone else has needed, created, and been gracious enough to share.
Some examples below – some of which I’ve used, and some I’ve just found now to illustrate a point! š
The resources out there really are endless. Many are free, some ask for a contribution if you find them useful, and if you go looking you can find paid for offerings too – often, but not always, of a superior quality.
If you’ve stumbled across a gem the world deserves to know about, do give it a shout out in the comments.
It’s Black Friday week on Amazon again – already! I did very well on this last year once I got the hang of it, and I’ve been haunting the daily deals Mon-Weds year-round ever since. If you haven’t experienced Amazon’s Lightening Deals before, here’s a quick guide to help you make the most of them.
It’s been quiet around here lately. Between work, Easter holidays for the kids and a training course for me, there’s not been much time for blogging. To get things rolling again, today’s post is a summary of the presentation I gave as part of the assessment for the Fetac Train the Trainer course I did a few weekends ago.
First off: deal sites – what are they? A relatively new phenomenon here in Ireland, deal sites allow individuals to club together on a bulk order of goods or services at a discount rate. For example, a vendor might say: if 100 people who are interested in buying X from me, I’ll give them all 50% off the standard price. There may be minimum or maximum limits on a deal: for example, there are only fifty of X available, or the deal’s not on unless there’s at least 20 people going to buy.
Where only a couple of years ago there were none of these sites in Ireland, now there are a multitude. And most don’t even limit themselves to one deal a day, they’ll list loads. That’s a lot of bargains to be had, but equally, a lot of money to spend or mis-spend.
Some sites specialise in deals for a particular demographic (for example, Dublin only), or of a specific nature (for example, tech only); others will do anything that’s going. If you can identify the site(s) of interest to you, you’ll be able to tune out some of the noise and only hear about deals that are relevant. This will remove some of the temptation, and hopefully result in you nabbing a few real bargains.
So, how do you tell if a deal is really a bargain?
Once you’ve determined that an advertised deal is indeed a genuine bargain for you, then you need to check when the deal has to be bought: Today? This week? Before the 10 items on offer have been snapped up? Some deals are redeemed automatically as soon as the deal ends, in other cases, you’ll need to contact the vendor and place an order or make an appointment. Make sure you know which you’re dealing with. If there’s a restriction on when the deal can be redeemed, make sure you avail of it in the designated timeframe, otherwise you’ve wasted your money instead of making the most of it!
In the EU, you’re legally entitled to change your mind about any online purchase within 7 days for any or no reason. This is particularly useful to be aware of if you spot a deal too close to its expiration to do your background research (buy now, change your mind tomorrow after you’ve spent some time with a search engine). If also means you’re covered if you buy a voucher for a service and discover the provider can’t offer the service on the date(s) you want (a holiday that’s booked out for the only week you and your sister can travel together), or if you find that you and your 8 siblings all decided to get your dad the exact same nifty tech gadget for his birthday after seeing an amazing deal.
For goods, if they’re not fit for purpose (broken, damaged, just plain useless), you’re always entitled to ask for refund, repair or replacement as applicable. The fact that they were sold through a deal site makes no difference – unless the deal specifically advertised them as faulty, but I’ve not seen a deal like that so far!
And finally, most/all of these sites have a customer support service who may be able to do something for you even if neither of the two options above apply. I bought a voucher for services a while back, and after a month of no response from the vendor whether I made contact by online form (as requested), email, or phone, I decided I wouldn’t want to do business with them even if I could make contact. When I told my story, the deal site support immediately offered me site credit as compensation, which I was happy to take.
So – there you have it, my top tips on finding bargains, nabbing bargains, and changing your mind. Get out there bargain hunters, and save some money!
I’d like to share a few useful tips and tricks for working with PowerPoint that I’ve come across over the years, starting off in this article with a few tips on how to work with automatic timings, and to break from those timings when things go off track.
I’ve tested all of these procedures with PowerPoint 2010 while writing – your mileage may vary with other versions.
Imagine you’ve been given 5 minutes to give a presentation with 20 slides (yes, this really happens – check out Ignite Dublin for some excellent examples).
Left to manually change slides you might panic and move too fast, or get too engrossed in your story and have to stop before you’re halfway through. You could keep an eye on the clock, distracting you from what you’re saying; or ask an audience member to prompt you at intervals, distracting them.
A more elegant solution is to apply automatic timings to your slides. In the case of Ignite, I believe each slide gets equal time, so the solution is simple (15 seconds per slide), but in another forum, you might want to give twice as long to one slide as another, or run 5 slides in rapid succession, spending the rest of the time focusing on the remainder.
PowerPoint allows you to rehearse delivering your presentation and time how long you spend on each slide. It can then replicate the flow for you when you’re delivering for real. It’ll also let you know your overall presentation time, so if you need to bump it out a bit or reign it in, you can decide which slide timings to tweak. And you can edit the per-slide timings manually – you don’t need to rehearse and record a second time unless you really want to.
To rehearse and record your timings:
Go to the Slide Show ribbon and click Rehearse Timings. PowerPoint will start the presentation from slide 1.To edit slide timings:
Select the slide whose timings you want to edit.Note: In the Advance Slide section, you can uncheck the box beside After if you want to stay on the current slide for an indefinite amount of time, for example where audience participation is required and you don’t know how long will be required. In this case, the presentation will move forward automatically on the other slides, but wait for you to manually move on from this one.
If you want to turn off automatic transitions for all slides, go to the Slide Show ribbon and de-select the Use Timings check box.
Sometimes you’ll want to depart from your presentation due to a pertinent question, an impromptu debate, or an interesting tangent. If the content in the current slide is relevant to your break, you can pause your presentation by right-clicking and selecting Pause.
If it’s not, you can quickly blank the screen by either tapping B on your keyboard to show a Black screen, or W to show a White screen. Clicking B, W or the space bar will return you to your presentation, and timings will resume from where they left off. For example, if you clicked B 5 seconds into a 15 second slide, it will stay up for a further 10 seconds when you resume.
If you want to skip ahead in your presentation, you can simply click your mouse, hit the space bar, or use the forward or down arrow keys. All do the same thing and move you forward one slide at a time.
If you jump ahead, any timing set for the slide you move to remains the same – if it was due to stay up for 5 minutes originally, it will stay up for 5 minutes from the time you open it, even if you get there 10 minutes early.
To move backwards in a presentation, one slide at a time, use the back or up arrow keys.
When you jump back to a particular slide, PowerPoint will stick with that slide till you’re ready to move on, regardless of any timing settings. Once you move forward again to any subsequent slide, the recorded timings from that point on apply as usual.
