The Tribe of Adminsa home for wayward admins

I know none of you believed me last  year. Don’t lie. I know it’s true…you were too scared to try it. It’s OK. Really. I understand. Honest. But now it’s time to get over it! If you have investment real estate, a business with employees, complex trusts…head straight for the CPA. Absolutely. If you’re a “normal” admin? Save yourself a couple hundred bucks.

TurboTax walks you through it…it’s like having your grandmother hold your hand through the whole process. You’ll still collect all those receipts from your purse, desk, glove compartment, still swear you’ll get organized next year..the difference is that you do it in your own time, in bits and pieces if you want and you can do it for FREE. Grandma wouldn’t charge you, right?

OK…here’s the deal: if you file 1040EZ, you can do the Federal return completely free. If you have enough deductions that you need to file a regular 1040, it’s costs $29.95. You can spend as much as $74.95 for the super duper Home and Business version. How’s that compare with your CPA again? Maximum refund is guaranteed, 100% accurate calculations are guaranteed and it comes with a free Audit Support Center and live tax advice. Hmmm. My CPA never guaranteed anything.

I’m not dissing CPAs. Really. It’s just that we don’t need ‘em.

Prefer downloading the software to doing your taxes online? Use this link:
Get your biggest tax refund, guaranteed. Plus FREE Expert Tax Advice. Download TurboTax® Deluxe to maximize your deductions.
 

 
 
 
Of

course

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012

Related Posts:

• Don’t Spend Money on a Tax Pro!

For reasons known only to themselves and perhaps Loki, Microsoft doesn’t easily give up the secret for tabbing within a cell in a Word table. If you hit tab, you move to the next cell. The solution is easy though, and surprisingly, consistent between Mac and Windows: hold the Control key and tab.

Related Posts:

• Hiding Data in a Word Table
• Changing the Page Number Style in Word
• Aligning Bullet Indents in Word and PowerPoint
• Can’t Remove Gray Border in Word Table
• Picture Doesn’t Show in Word
• Can I Create a PDF without Adobe Acrobat?
• Lots of New Stuff
• Who Loves Office 2007?
• Wikiing Up to Word
• A Better Way to Organize Your Outlook Email

Now that I know to use the Windows key to lock my screen, I thought I should poke around and see what else it can do. The answer turns out to be “lots!”

Win – all by itself – brings up the “Start” menu.

My favorite: Win + P pops up a Projection window that makes it at least a little clearer what you’re choosing…you know the drill…hmmm, is it fn +F7 to see it on both computer and screen, or is it just F7 or is it fn +F8…I can never remember. This at least provides a little visual guidance, and “Win +P” is a little more in keeping with Mac philosophy of making something memorable about the letter choice. I can – probably – remember that “project” starts with “P.” I hope. Here’s how it looks:

Win + F opens Windows search (“Find”)
 
And of course we remember that Win+D displays the Desktop
 
Those are the ones that interest me. Some that may interest you:
Win + R is Run dialog box (I swear I don’t even know what this means)
Win + M is Minimize all
SHIFT + Win+M will undo minimize all
Win + TAB: Cycle through taskbar buttons
Win+F1 takes you to Help. They jumped the tracks here. Why not ” Win + H”?
Win + E takes you to that useless spot with the confusing name: Windows Explorer
CTRL + Win + TAB: Moves focus from Start, to the Quick Launch toolbar, to the system tray (at this point, I’m not even listening anymore)
Win + Break: System Properties dialog box
 
If you really want to get serious, Wikipedia has an exhaustive list here.
 
I don’t have time to save that much time.

Related Posts:

• How to Cascade Windows in Windows 7
• Finding Desktop and Lock in Windows 7

I’m excited to announce that we’re growing again, and since each new tribe member brings new skills, we’ll be offering a new service: transcription. I’ve been seeing some pretty shocking work coming from inexpensive transcription services staffed by people who are practicing English as a new second language. As impressive as it is that they can do the work, they lack the experience to understand our idioms and business terms. The result: entertaining babble for you and I…not so much for the client.

We now offer quality transcription at very competitive prices. The work will be done by highly literate native English speakers who will also provide executive summaries and an outline of the high points as an option.

Who uses transcribers? People who subscribe to a webcast but don’t have time to listen to the whole thing. Executives who record meetings and need minutes. Videographers doing collaborative editing. Researchers, lecturers, and scholars. Interviewers. Authors. Doctors. You?

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

Someone asked how to hide certain data in a Word table. Unfortunately, a Word table isn’t like Excel; you can’t choose “hide column” and be done with it. There are some workarounds, however.

1) Create your data in Excel and import it into your Word doc one of two ways:

A) Choose “Insert,” then choose “Object.” When the window comes up, scroll down to “Microsoft Excel Worksheet.” Click “OK.” This will open Excel. Anything that you do in Excel will show up in the Word doc, hidden columns and rows and all.

B) Create the worksheet in Excel, save it, the follow the steps above, but choose “From file” and choose your file. This will embed your worksheet in your Word document. When you want to hide columns or rows, double clicking will take you into Excel to make the changes, which will be reflected in the Word doc.

Don’t want to use Excel? There are other options:

2) You can format text as hidden. If you choose to hide the text in a column, the column will remain, but will be blank. If you do it on a row, the row will actually be hidden. How to do this:
Select the column or row. Select “Format” then “Text” (or the appropriate panes in 2007 or later). In the window that comes up you’ll see several checkboxes. The last one is “hidden.” Check it and click “OK.”

Keep in mind that unless you protect your document, there’s nothing to stop the person at the other end from unhiding that text, but the same is true of the Excel document.

3) You can make your font white (or whatever the background color is) and protect the document.

4) You can buy a redaction plug-in or use the highlighter tool set to black and pretend you’re a censor.

Related Posts:

• Changing the Page Number Style in Word
• How to Tab within a Cell in Word Tables
• Aligning Bullet Indents in Word and PowerPoint
• Picture Doesn’t Show in Word
• Can I Create a PDF without Adobe Acrobat?
• Lots of New Stuff
• Who Loves Office 2007?
• Wikiing Up to Word
• Can’t Remove Gray Border in Word Table
• Editing PDF Files That Won’t Be Edited

My laptop gets so hot that I have to stop what I’m doing periodically. This not only makes me grumpy, it shortens the life of the laptop, which doesn’t appeal to my “Thrifty Admin” soul. I’m always going to buy one of laptop cooler desks “when I have some extra money.” Of course, once hell freezes over I won’t need it anymore. This guy has solved the problem an it’s more or less free.

Of course, you can still go higher tech!

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

It’s very frustrating for those of us who use dual monitors to try to compare, copy and paste between two PowerPoint documents in Windows. Word, Visio and some other programs allow you to open two copies of the program at once so you can display one on each monitor, but PowerPoint has a “parent” function that sends you to your room when you try. Here’s a workaround:

Put PowerPoint on your left-hand monitor (optional, but easier).

Under “Window” in the tool bar, or the “View” pane in other versions, choose “Arrange All.” You’ll see your presentations side by side, like this:

Now grab the sizing control in the bottom right corner of your main PowerPoint Window – the “parent” window – and stretch the window across both monitors. Now just move to right-hand deck to the right-hand monitor and you can edit between the two easily.

Or, of course, you could just buy a Mac.

How to view Excel on dual monitors
 

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

We may as well suck it up and talk about Visio common problems. I don’t want to think about it either, but it has to be done. Get your rubber gloves and mask on and let’s get started.

First up: you select a Walt Worthy, Vice President of Well-Being and use your arrow key to nudge him across the page. That’s what this function is called, by the way – “nudge.” Spelled like what people call you, but that’s pronounced “noodge.”

Instead a frolicking swiftly and neatly across the page, Walt stays put and whole page moves. Huh?

It turns out to be quite simple: your scroll lock is on. You shouldn’t have rested your hand on it while you were doing your nails. If you’re like me, you never use scroll lock and don’t even know where it is. I can’t tell you exactly; it varies from keyboard to keyboard. Look for it somewhere that’s easy to hit while you’re manhandling 13 things at once. Mine is near the upper right and it looks like this:

Scroll lock position varies

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

You probably use personal files (PST files) to save and sort important emails. You’ve probably tried rules to file email as it arrives. The usual result is dozens of folders to check instead of just one, and the whole system lasts a week or less. I have a better way to use rules to tame your email. I create a new rule for each commonly used folder as follows:

Create a new rule “from people or distribution list” or “with a particular subject”— whatever you need. When you chose your action, instead of choosing “file in a particular folder,” choose “make a copy in a particular folder.” Now the email is automatically filed as it arrives, but still in your inbox where you can read it easily. Once you’ve acted on it, throw it away. This eliminates all the clicking and dragging you do to file your emails.

There is a reason I said “commonly used folder.” If you give Outlook too much to think about, it has a hissy and breaks all the rules. I run 10-12 rules without a problem; that covers the things I file most often, and the remaining “keepers” I file manually by sorting by name or title and dragging the whole group into the folder. This has drastically cut down the time I spend managing my inbox, and I love it, because I hate to file!

Are you worried that all those duplicates will bloat your inbox? They won’t, for two reasons:

1) You’ve set up an autoarchive that dumps your trash on a regular basis (haven’t you?).

2) You’ve set up your personal files so they aren’t eating up space in your inbox.

You haven’t? Well, now that you have all this free time, get to it.

Or you could just let the cat take care of it...

Related Posts:

• eMail Program Double Spaced My Paste!
• Accepting a Previously Declined Invitation
• Not Seeing Your Outlook Question? Try This!
• Drunken Time Zones in Outlook
• Outlook Invitation Disappears When You Decline
• Outlook FAQ Has Updated
• About that double-booked room…
• The Outlook FAQ
• Managing Time Zones in Outlook
• How to Tab within a Cell in Word Tables

You used to right click an application in the tray and cascade all the open windows in an application. Very useful if you’re like me and end up with 20 or so messages open and want to move through them quickly. Along came Windows 7 and …whaaaattt??? No cascade??? Seriously???

What you’ve been seeing are these cute little thumbnails you can click on:

Hovering over the Outlook icon brings up a thumbnail view of every open window

 Those are great fun until you have to start panning across the screen to about the 5th window. 30 open messages=zero fun.

Enter Shift + Ctrl + Right Click. Shift + Ctrl + Right Click on the program icon (in this case, Outlook) and you’ll see a window with the old options:

You can still cascade, stack, show windows side by side, minimize, restore or close all windows

Say yea.

Related Posts:

• Making Use of the Windows Key in Windows 7
• Finding Desktop and Lock in Windows 7