by Dan Butler
22 March 2007
issues has been a big hit but a little dated. Look for more
goodies in future issues. I point to another neat tool today.
First Al briefly talks about fonts, templates, and user
interfaces.
lot of time with the past week learning some new skills.
——- Recommended Resource ———
Audio and Video are the current big thing on the Internet.
YouTube, Google Video, personal websites, vacation videos,
sports teams and more. Jason James has put together a really
cool site that teaches you how to create web based audio and
video and how to make money with them if that is what you want
to do. The site has hours of video instruction on how to create,
edit, publish, and promote your videos and audios.
I like this course a lot – you will too. Go take a look now:
http://zcat.com/qpp/x.php?adminid=8&tid=37
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Making You Look Good by Al Gordon
The thing that will startle you about Microsoft Office 2007
(actually it’s the second thing; the new “Ribbon” interface will
be the first): Times New Roman and Arial aren’t the default
fonts any more.
In Word 2007, Calibri (a sans serif font) is the new text
default instead of Times while Cambria (a serif) is now the
heading font instead of Arial. Also, the default formats now use
multiple colors instead of black and white. Headings are blue,
for instance.
I personally will stand and cheer for this. It is all part of a
major overhaul of Office in the good taste department. Microsoft
spends millions on art design for templates, prefab documents,
and the like. But all too often the result was boring, if not
downright ugly.
Face it. Of all those scores of slide designs in PowerPoint, how
many can you think of using without cringing? Most are so garish
that they would only serve to distract your audience from your
presentation. (Let’s ignore for now, of course, those occasions
when you DO want them distracted.)
Office applications now ship with generally sharp and
professional looking templates, with broad capabilities to
customize them by using supplied color schemes, formatting
styles, design themes, and font pairings. That alone multiplies
the template options by a vast percentage, which becomes nearly
infinite if you create custom schemes. No longer will your
documents, spreadsheets, and presentation have the same old,
same old look.
Furthermore, you can preview style changes before you apply them
and can swap back and forth from one look to another as it suits
your fancy.
Apple managed the tasteful design equation with its Keynote
(presentations) and Pages (word processing) software. But other
than cool tools for placing graphics, these “iWork” apps do not
the easiest interfaces of all time. Microsoft has just pulled
off the neat trick of improving tastefulness AND ease of use.
We all like to take potshots at Microsoft. But this time they
have done well.
(c) 2007 Al Gordon.
In addition to his computer interests, Al Gordon is a political
and media consultant in the Boston area.
Cool Tool JR Screen Ruler
measure things. Sound pretty boring huh? When you start
using the ruler you find many uses: checking margins, working
with photos, web pages, printing, and lots more. Just lining
things up in some applications becomes much easier. JR Screen
Ruler is a free ruler for Windows users. There is a pro version
if you needs are greater. Pick up your copy here:
http://www.spadixbd.com/freetools/jruler.htm
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Copyright 2007 Dan Butler
All Rights Reserved.
ISSN: 1522-4422
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