Posted by tribeofa | Posted in Adobe Acrobat, PDF | 
| Posted on 30-03-2009
We tend to think of PDF files as carved in stone, but if you have Acrobat Pro, you have a chisel. It’s not always easy, but there are some tools for touching up text that often work quite well. Today was not one of those days for me.
I had a document that merely needed a change to the signature block. Piece of cake. Open it in Pro, use the the “Touch Up Text” tool and change it. Do you hear the gong? If the document has been created in a font that your system doesn’t have, you can’t edit the text. Nope. Not at all. No cheating, no tricks, not gonna happen. Deep breath: there’s a workaround.
See that little camera? It’s called the snapshot tool. Click on the camera, then drag around the whole document except the signature block. As soon as you let go, it’s on your clipboard. Paste it into Word and drag your margins out to the edges. You should now have the same page you saw in the PDF with room at the bottom. Add in your signature block and you’re finished. Have a footer? Do the same thing with the footer; just paste it after the signature block.
OK, it’s not perfect because – DUH! -you don’t have the font. It’s better than not having the document, though, and you can do the signature in a similar font and disguise it with italics or bold, or insert it in a harmonious font.
Another workaround: scan the document and follow the directions here to turn it into a Word document. Make your changes and, if you want, save it as a PDF.
And that was my day.
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Posted by tribeofa | Posted in MS Outlook | | Posted on 06-03-2009
There’s a new addition to the Outlook Wiki about dealing with time zones. You can find it here.
Looking for the Forum? Click here.
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Posted by tribeofa | Posted in How to..., Software | | Posted on 26-02-2009
This site is heavily skewed to Microsoft Office, but there are a lot of other heavily-used software suites out there–Lotus Notes, “notably”–so if you have answered a lot of questions about some other piece of software, send in the questions and answers. People need you!
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Posted by tribeofa | Posted in Concur, How to... | | Posted on 24-02-2009
Those of you who use an older version of Concur as your expense client may discover a bug when your manager travels internationally. Once you’ve entered an expense type and entered a city in another country, a box will come up on the right asking for the amount in local dollars and the exchange rate (you can get this with a little math and the actual credit card charge. It will vary by posting date).
The rub comes when you have local expenses to enter. If you’ve already entered an international expense, the exchange rate box will appear and Concur will insist that your city is international. It’s easy to get caught up in it being wrong and miss the forest for the trees, so: you don’t need to do separate reports, or worry about entering the local charges first, or even learn to speak French. Just enter “1″ for the exchange rate. It won’t mess up your accounts payable department at all.
The latest version of Concur has–mercifully–repaired this bug.
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Posted by tribeofa | Posted in MS Word | | Posted on 23-02-2009
There’s the beginnings of an MS Word pseudo-wiki here now. There are a couple of pages – one on how to reorder a last name first list (or vice versa if you’re so inclined), and a trick for using Word to count items in a list. What’s lacking are YOUR tips, so hit the contact or comment button and send in your pointers and questions. Let’s make this grow into a real tool!
The point of these software specific directories is to collect the experience of the people in our role who really use the it, as opposed to that of tech writers who try to imagine how we’ll use it. Documentation is all well and good, but nothing helps as much as a peer.
Got a quick question? Post it on the forum.
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Posted by tribeofa | Posted in MS Internet Explorer, Printing | | Posted on 15-01-2009
Your executive asks you to print off that article on Golfing Underwater he saw on www.throwawaybigbucks.com. Piece of cake, right? You print from Explorer…and the right edge is cut off. Phooey.
You set your page to landscape. The right side is STILL cut off.
If you have Acrobat, so you try printing to PDF. No joy.
After you kick the printer a couple of times, you try to cut and paste the article into a Word doc. Either it’s protected and won’t let you, or you get all of the golf clubs and bubbles and Montblac ads on the page mixed into the article. You pick out the article sentence by sentence and paste it into a new doc, and print that.
Only 45 minutes later, and you’ve printed an article! You’re not embarrassed…much. Don’t let this happen to you!
Tell your IT department that it’s crucial for you to have Adobe Acrobat PRO, and that it needs to be set up so that you have its icon in Explorer. For reasons I don’t even want to contemplate, if you choose “convert web page to pdf” from this icon, it will create a perfect document, but if you choose File>Print and choose Adobe Acrobat as the printer it will make a PDF with a cut-off right edge. Obtain the icon, even if you have to bite ankles to do it.
UPDATE: MS Explorer 2007 claims to have solved this problem, so that’s another solution.
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Posted by tribeofa | Posted in How to..., MS Excel | | Posted on 15-01-2009
Excel opens multiple spreadsheets within one “shell,” which is sort of frustrating to people who use two monitors – rather defeats the purpose. The workaround is pretty simple. I blushed that it took me so long to figure it out, but you may be just as slow as I am so here it is:
Open Excel. Drag it to your extra monitor. Open it again. Reread what I just said – don’t make a new workbook…open it again. Bingo – one on each monitor. You can freely drag and drop between them.
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Posted by tribeofa | Posted in How to..., MS Word, OCR, Scanning | | Posted on 15-01-2009
Convert A Scanned File to an editable Word doc
Steps
- 1. Scan the page you want to convert into a Microsoft Word document.
- 2. Save the scanned image in *.gif, *.jpeg or whatever format.
- 3. Open that image, go to “File->Save As” and name it “xyz.tiff” in the “TIFF” format as shown.
- 4. Go to “Start->Programs->Microsoft Office Tools->Microsoft Office Document Imaging”
- 5. Go to “File->Open” and open your scanned document that has been saved in *.TIFF format.
- 6. Go to “Tools->Send Text to Word.” You will get a prompt stating this process will take time, Click OK. This will take some time depending on your computer’s speed (a minute or two at the most).
- 7. When it’s done it will open up Microsoft word on its own and the scanned document will now be in editable mode.
Things You’ll Need
- Microsoft Word 2003 or newer
- Scanned image of the document you want to turn into a Microsoft Word document
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