Productivity – Page 5 – Tech, writing, and tech writing

Screenshotting

A quick roundup of how to screenshot on various devices.

iOS: Power button and Home button – image goes to your Camera Roll album.
Android (4.0 and up): Power button and Volume Down button – image goes to the Screenshot album of the Gallery app.
Mac: Cmd–Shift–4, then drag the crosshairs that appear to section of a rectangular area of your screen – image goes to your desktop.
Windows: Ctrl–Alt–Print Screen to grab the active window, or Print Screen to grab the whole desktop – image goes to your clipboard, so open a graphics program, or Word, or mail, or … and paste it in.

Improving Webpage Readability in Safari on iOS

I don’t know how I’ve managed to miss this trick up to now, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to change my life. If you read web pages on an iOS device, it may change yours too.

If you’re looking at a webpage in the Safari browser on iOS and you see a little icon to the left of the URL field, you can click the icon to strip out all extraneous information on the page leaving only the text (automatically bumped up to a more readable size) and the images associated with the main page story. See the example below.

Note: You can achieve the same results on a MacOS device by clicking the Reader button to the right of the URL field.

Custom Ribbons in Word

I find it occassionally useful to drag some buried functionality in Word right up to the surface and add it to a ribbon so that it’s a click away instead of half a dozen clicks, 3 dialogs and 2 tabs away. And thanks to custom ribbons, I can!

To create a custom ribbon (checked against Word 2010 and Word 2013):

Click File | Options, to open the Word Options dialog.
Click Customize Ribbon in the left-hand panel of the dialog.
Click New Tab below the tab list on the right-hand side of the dialog.
A new tab named New Tab (Custom) is added to the tab list, with a default group, New Group (Custom), nested below it.
To rename the new tab and the new group, select the tab/group entry, click Rename… below the tab list, enter a meaningful Display name on the Rename dialog and click OK.
Note: Word adds one group to a new tab by default, but you can add more by clicking New Group below the tab list. A divider appears between each group on the ribbon, and the group name appears below the ribbon buttons.
Next, the fun bit: adding commands!
In the right-hand panel, select the custom group to which you want to add one or more commands.
Scroll through the list of commands in the left-hand panel, and for each one you want to add, select the command then click Add>>.
You can filter the list of commands using the Choose commands from drop-down list at the top of the left-hand list. I like to use the All Commands filter to make sure I don’t miss anything! 🙂
Once you’ve got all the commands you want added, the final tweak is to arrange the tab, group and command positions to your liking by selecting each one and either dragging it up/down the list or clicking the Move Up/Move Down arrows.
Click OK to save your new ribbon.

Hey presto, your wonderful new ribbon is available at the top of Word every time you open it.

Notes: You can also customise Word’s default ribbons, and if you work on multiple machines and would like to use your customizations elsewhere, the Import/Export button on the Customize Ribbon screen of the Word Options dialog allows you to do just that.

Printing from iThings at Home

I have long been driven mad by wanting to print an article, or an email, or whatever from my iPhone or iPad at home, but our trusty printers (that I have no interest in replacing) aren’t AirPlay-enabled. Instead, I’ve resorted to emailing myself details of the thing that needs printing, then cranking up the ol’ Windows laptop, waiting, waiting, waiting some more, logging in, waiting some more for networks to be associated with, waiting some more… you get the idea… and eventually, printing the thing.

Yesterday evening, I decided “No more!”, and embarrassingly enough, in under 10 minutes with an expenditure of around €15, we were set up with a delightful working solution and no messing about with mystic configuration settings.

Printopia from ecamm downloads in minutes, installs in seconds, is configured in seconds, and worked first time. We downloaded the free 7 day trial first, managed to print random pages/emails/whatever from a few different devices, so immediately took the plunge and invested in the full version.

Printopia shares out the printers configured for the Mac it’s installed on to be detected as AirPlay print options by iThings on the same network. You can also configure apps such as iPhoto or Evernote, or services like Dropbox as “print” options to print/archive content there.

It’s Mac only, and if the Mac it’s installed on has fallen asleep, you’ll need to prod it awake before you can print. Our Mac wakes in seconds from hibernate, with a tap on the keyboard, or opening the Remote app, or pinging it, compared with the seemingly-infinite ramp-up time for my Windows laptop.

I’m thrilled with the solution and think it’s worth every penny – would heartily recommend it to anyone with non-AirPlay printers and a Mac that’s always or almost always on their network.

Downloadables

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! 🙂

Stuck for a piece of graph paper – bog standard, or wildly unusual – don’t have time to go visit a stationers, and lack the patience to spend your evening trying to draw your own? A quick search for “free downloadable graph paper” should point you at sites like incompetech.com/graphpaper/.
Kids learning to write and need extra sheets from those weird copy books with the extra lines showing you were the rising and falling bits of their letters should end? Try printablepaper.net/category/penmanship
(I did actually spend too much time with Excel trying to reinvent the wheel before finding that one!)
How about handwriting sheets with letters/words ready to trace? How about handwritingworksheets.com or worksheetworks.com/english/writing/handwriting.html. Both of these sites will even let you specify what practice text you want on the sheet.
And it doesn’t have to be all about academic stuff. How about a printable garden planner, so that you can make the most of your outside space? Check out frugalliving.about.com/od/gardening/ss/Printable-Garden-Notebook.htm
Or tracking household stuff, like family schedules, memberships/subscriptions, meal plans, and the like. There are sites like thenesteffect.com/p/free-printables.html.

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.