Mrs. Mecomber’s Scrapbook

I do a lot of printing. I print worksheets for my children’s schoolwork. I also have a small business where I need to print out all my expenses and profits every month. UGH! I used to like paperwork, but now… lol. Anyway, I have this problem where sometimes a small portion of my information prints out on a second sheet of paper. Paper is becoming very expensive (I remember when I could get a ream for $15, and now it’s $40!). I’m always looking for tips and other small business opportunitites to save me money or time.

Here’s a terrific tip I found for saving a little bit of money when printing documents in Microsoft Word. I use an older version of Word, so the details may be different for your version. The option will still be there, you’ll just have to look around a little.

I click File>>> Print Preview

Choose “Shrink to Fit” button.

When you do this, Word will automatically tweak the page (the font size, the margin space, etc). Of course, if you don’t like it, go to Edit>>> Undo, and it will take you back to where you were.

Cool idea, huh!

Hat tip WXPNews.com, a great website!

Before I had image-editing software, and before I knew what I was doing, I used to paste all my images in Microsoft Word. But after saving it, I had NO IDEA how to get the image onto, say, a web page. My image had been essentially locked by Word.

I came across a helpful blog post explaining how to extract images from Word.

Just open up the Word document, then go to file> save as option and save the document as a web page. This will create a new document with the images in a separate folder with the same name. Go into the folder and you will get 2 version of the image, one is in .jpg and the other is in .png.

The .jpg will be the smaller size and the .png will be the original size. If you like to use the original image since it is much larger to view but wanted in different format, just open up your image viewer and save the image in the format that you prefer.

I haven’t tried this yet, but I will. It looks like it would work perfectly. It’s a handy tip!

Got a blog? Got readers? I have several blogs, and many readers, yay! I haven’t been too astute about providing easy means of accessing my content for my readers, however. I have RSS feed for some, but setting up RSS accounts is a real pain to do (and when the blog or blog server is down, so are all the feeds). I personally prefer receiving email updates to my favorite blogs, more than reading RSS feeds and reading them in third-party feed readers. That’s why I’m looking into Zookoda. It’s FREE and we all know how much I love that price tag! Zookoda is offered by the folks at IZEA (the brains behind PayPerPost, SocialSpark, and the Blogger’s Choice Awards).

IZEA offers Zookoda, which is an online software program where you can send email updates of your latest blog posts to your readers’ email inboxes. It’s a sophisticated piece of “bloggerware,” but it is extremely simple to use. With Zookoda, you can also manage all your subscribers, design newsletters to match your blog, schedule broadcasts, and even email in text format (this is great for mobile users who read your blogs). There is much more you can do, too. I’m very impressed with the software and how easy it is to use. And it’s free! Pretty amazing. There is also a terrific forum set up by IZEA (it includes boards for all IZEA products and services, but also has a specific one geared for Zookoda users). The IZEA forum is one of the best on the Internet, too, so you can’t go wrong with that. Check it out. I’ll be gearing up with it soon, as I want to create a subscription service for my travel blog, first. So, stay tuned for that!

Here’s a really fun website for those of you interested in business cards. It’s LogoYes and it has got to be the simplest and easiest site I’ve seen for making your own business cards. These days, everybody seems to want to be promoting something (can be either your business or your blog– anything, really). I’ve had 250 cards printed up for my travel blog, to leave at museums and to give to curious onlookers, lol.

Anyway, LogoYes has a huge selection of classy templates and fonts. I loved the Adirondack-looking mountain logo design. I could do all sorts of things with the software. I tinkered around a little.

Wow, I LOVE that design! Doesn’t the card ooze class and style?

I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to create the card. You can see the card-creating interface in the photos above. The website uses a Flash-based software to create the design, which made it very interactive, like a game. Making changes and going back to alter text was extremely easy.

It is very important that logo designs do not lose detail when you make the text/images smaller. LogoYes met that standard; the mountain design looked great whether I enlarged it or diminished it. I was impressed.

This is a great site for the do-it-yourselfer desktop publisher! Prices are affordable; business cards are definitely an investment, so you want to choose your card style wisely. You can try out the stuff for yourself– the site offers a free demo. Have fun!

Have a blog and need to keep track of your word count? Or, if you are like my daughter, do you tend to write 5,000 words for a 1,000 word essay and need to keep track, lol? I found a handy little online tool called the Word Count Tool. It’s free to use. It’s an online software program. Just copy and paste your words into the box, and click “submit.” Pretty handy. And it’s a lot less weighty than having to copy and paste your words into a bulky program like Microsoft Word or Open Office.

In other news, I haven’t been blogging to this blog much, and I’m sorry! I have a lot on my plate right now. And now that spring is here, the gardens have been calling me. But I’ll be popping in from time to time, giving links to the latest cool promotional products, free software, and security news. I also hope to keep posting my tutorials regularly.

Remember, if you have a geeky question, always feel free to ask. Use the “Contact Me” link at the top. I will try my best to get back to you.

I was asked to explain how one captures a screenshot of your computer desktop. Believe it or not, it is extremely easy! And very fun.

Simultaneously press “ctrl” and “PRTSC/SYSRQ” on your keyboard. This essentially copies what’s on your desktop to your clipboard. What’s needed now is how to paste your copied content into a document. This is where things get varied, because not everyone has the same software.

The most basic graphic program is Paint. It’s not terribly sophisticated, but it will do the job. You can also download a plethora of free editing programs, like Irfanview or Paint.NET. I have a tutorial on using Irfanview here, and I have written something up about making small thumbnails here. You can find Irfanview for free by doing a search at download.com.

I use PaintShopPro, because I like to crop my graphics. Irfanview does not crop images, but it does resize them. Paint and Paint.NET do crop images; they resize images but I think Irfanview does a better job with resizing.

OK, so I’ll just tell you what I do, and you can choose your software program and take it from there.

I make a copy of my desktop image. I then crop the image so I only get what I want in the photo. Then I resize the image to, usually, about 180 width (about how wide my sidebars in my blog are). I then sharpen the image for clarity.

Then, I upload my little graphic to Photobucket. They have a cute little editing program, too. I use this to build a picture frame around my graphic, and I save it like that. And this is what I wind up with:

As always, if you have any questions, leave a comment or email me via the contact form, and I’ll try my best to answer your questions in a timely manner.

Here’s an amazing thing: document scanning services! Sourcecorp, a New England company, provides a unique service with their document managing service, called ImageSilo. It’s a service geared toward making all the paperwork for businesses a little easier. Documents are scanned at the company, and uploaded to their “web based document repository” (conveniently named the “Image Silo”). It’s much like outsourcing your paperwork, except that this is an American company.

The documents are heavily encrypted, and the company promises 99.9% uptime so the data is always available. There’s a 30-day free trial. If you are a business owner looking for a way to consolidate paperwork and increase productivity, you might want to check into this. Online storage is available, too.

I’ve noticed that more document-type programs are going online. Spreadsheets, Word documents, and the like are becoming more popular as more applications go online. And everyone has heard of data backups. I don’t think downloaded programs will ever go away, but many computer-cluttering programs are going online.

For many years, I suffered under the grips of the only real word processing and spreadsheet program out there: the Microsoft Office Suite. At least it was better than Microsoft Works, ha ha. But Word and PowerPoint always crashed on me a lot. I learned to save my documents at every single change or line of new type (so MS Office did do one good thing for me– gave me a good habit). But the constant crashes and the burden it put on my laptop processor had me longing for something else.

I found it with OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org, like Firefox, is an open source program. This means that the making and the “engine” of the program is not a stealthy secret hidden in the confines of large file cabinets in Seattle, Washington. Open source means that everyone can see what the code is that makes up the program, and you can even contribute to it to make it even better. Ah, the beauty of the Internet.

I first became familiar with OpenOffice.org several years ago, when I had dial-up service. It took f o r e v e r to download. I am happy to say there have been many improvements to both OpenOffice.org and my internet service (now DSL).

OpenOffice.org is a great bundle of free software. It is split up into several smaller packages. I’ll give you a run down of what’s included, with a very, very brief summary description of each. Click on the links to learn more at OpenOffice.org website.

Writer is the word processor and desktop publisher. I use this the most. You can use it to make diagrams, letters, documents, indices, etc. Anything MS Word can do, OpenOffice.org can do better. OpenOffice.org has the added benefit of allowing you to save your files in PDF format with the click of a button. With MS Office, I had to download and configure a separate program to do that.

Impress is similar to MS Powerpoint. You can make slide shows and other multi-media documents with this.

Math is for stuff like… well, math. It can handle all those funky equations that mathematicians and my homeschooled kids need to use. Thisis something we were unable to do in MS Word, which was a continual frustration. I love OpenOffice.org Math!

Calc is a spreadsheet program. It’s very nice and more advanced than MS Excel. I like it much better.

Draw is a very fun program. My kids love it. I love it, too! I often use this program to concoct cover sheets and other image-based documents.

Base is a database program. I haven’t used it that much. Even though I love the computer, I still use a good old pencil and notebook for a lot of things. I’m getting there, though! I have yet to tranfer mounds of paperwork and archived administrative files onto computer. I’ll use Base when I do.

These are a lot of excellent features, all part of the OpenOffice.org package, and the best part of it all is that it is free! I love my OpenOffice.org. Give Microsoft a run for its money and try it out.

With the advent of internet phones, there has been an upward surge in voip deals. The internet voip is being used in every way imaginable. There is voip software for commercial as well as personal use. There has been an equal increase in skype download rate.