When it comes to maintaining a clean workspace, a scanner is by far one of the best tools for the job. With a scanner, you can easily store all of those documents from your desk into your computer. The great thing about having them on your computer is that there is an endless number of possibilities with what you can do. Honestly, the only reason why I scan documents onto my computer is so that I can search through them, especially for longer documents. By using Adobe Acrobat’s OCR-recognition feature, you can now turn those long, small-font, paper documents into digital text-searchable documents. Here’s how:
Turn on your scanner.
Open up Acrobat and go to File > Create PDF > From Scanner…
In the Acrobat Scan window, adjust the settings to your liking.
Be sure to check off “Make Searchable” and “Make Accessible”.
If you want, click on the “Options” button under Text Recognition and Metadata to edit the OCR settings.
Now click on the “Scan” button to scan the document into Acrobat.
When the scan is done, wait for Acrobat to finalize the document so it’s searchable.
Now when you open up the PDF with Acrobat or Preview, it is now searchable (text) and when you search with Spotlight it will go through those PDF’s as well.
The game of chess can be quite a boring game when played on the usual board, but not when played on a Mac. When you play the Chess game included on all Macs, you’d be quite surprised at how enjoyable your computer will make the game seem. The cool thing about playing chess on your Mac is you have the ability to control each one of your players just by using your voice. You can change which board you play on as well. Here’s how:
Load up Chess from your Applications folder.
Once it loads, you should notice a small silver circle appear with “Esc” in the center.
To move a player, you simply hold down the Esc button and say something like “Pawn A2 to A3”.
Although that sounds simple, you should have a basic understanding of the game itself beforehand.
If you’d like to change the looks of your chessboard, hold down the ⌘ (Command) and the “,” keys to activate the preferences.
From there, choose one of the Board styles: Wood, Metal, Marble, or Glass.
In the new version of Microsoft Office (2008), you have probably noticed the massive improvements to the user-interface. Thanks to designers at EnhancedLabs, the interface is remarkably beautiful. One of the main features to point out in the new version of Office are the Toolbars which now carry so much functionality with the SmartArt Graphics, Quick Tables, Charts, and the Document Elements. You can do just about everything you can imagine possible with Microsoft Office 2008. I’ll get you started by pointing out where the new features are and how to use them.
Using Handy Toolbars in Word
When you first open Word, you’ll see a new toolbar with many new additions.
When you select something from the toolbar like SmartArt Graphics, it should appear directly within your document.
When it appears, go ahead and enter in any data you need to, then feel free to customize the looks of it with the Formatting Palette.
In the new version of Word, there are new layout views such as Publishing Layout which is an amazing page-layout view with lots of templates.
The second layout update is the Notebook layout, which you just about customize any way you like.
I highly recommend you spend the time to go through each of those layouts and edit the built-in templates to learn all of the features they’re capable of.
If you used Microsoft Office 2004, then you probably remember that the default font was Times New Roman. That’s not the case with Office 2008 — it’s now Cambria.
Most of the documents I make with Word, must be in Times New Roman. To change the default font, hold down the ⌘ (Command) + “D” keys to activate the Font window.
Locate Times New Roman or whichever font you wish, then click on the “Default…” button in bottom left corner.
When you opened up PowerPoints in previous version of Microsoft Office for Mac, there wasn’t a sidebar that showed thumbnails of each slide. With the new version a sidebar has been included with this feature. I personally like it, so I can easily identify a certain slide and go right to it.
With PowerPoint open, just click on the sidebar in the left-hand side and select “Slides” instead of “Outline” to make the thumbnails appear.
If you like to edit your photos using an external editor such as Photoshop and like to use iPhoto to manage them, you’ve probably encountered a problem as to how to sync the iPhoto library with the edits you make. If you have not encountered that problem, I still recommend you take a look at this article as it may make things easier for you.
With iPhoto open, hold down the ⌘ (Command) and the “,” keys to activate the Preferences window.
In the Preferences window, make sure you’re in the General section. Then, go to the “Edit photo:” field and choose the external editor of choice in the drop-down menu.
Now, switch back to your library and select some photos that you would like to edit with the external editor. Hold down the Shift key or the ⌘ (Command) key to select more than one photo. Now right-click and choose “Edit in external editor” from the contextual menu.
The second way to open up photos, is within the external editor (Photoshop).
Open up Photoshop, and go to File > Open…
Now browse the photos in the Finder window and use the Shift or ⌘ (Command) key to select more than one photo.
Once you’ve finished making the edits to the image(s), save it (hold down ⌘ (Command) + “S”).
When you look at your iPhoto library, you should notice the changes made to the selected image(s).
If you wish to revert back to the original image, just right-click on the image and choose “Revert to Original” from the contextual menu.
Included with all new Macs is a neat little app called OmniOutliner. It serves as an “outliner” application which helps you put together your ideas. When you first open OmniOutliner, you may be shocked by how plain and simple its interface is. After this article, you will be surprised at all the power that OmniOutliner has. My main usage for this application is to make and manage my to-do lists — and man does it do a great job of doing that.
Go ahead and open up OmniOutliner.
Click on the “Inspect” button in the top right corner, or just hold down the Shift, ⌘ (Command), and “I” keys.
In the document that is open, select everything by holding down the ⌘ (Command) and the “A” keys. Now in the Inspect panel, go to the “Document: Display” section. Check off “Horizontal Grid” and “Vertical Grid”.
If you’d like to change the color of the grids, just click on the small color box beside “Horizontal/Vertical Grid” in the Inspect panel. Then select your color using the Color window (personally, I prefer a light gray color because it’s easier to look at).
One of the key steps in setting up a to-do list is proper organization.
The best way to organize your to-do list is with “categories”, such as “Other”, “To Buy”, “Projects”, or “Organize”.
To make these categories, just type the word in the first line with bold (hold down the ⌘ (Command) + “B” keys) print followed by a colon (“:“).
After you’ve typed the category title, hit the Return key, then the Tab key.
To add a column for due dates, just click on the “Add Column” button.
Now just type in your due dates in that extra column.
If you plan to use OmniOutliner a lot for one to-do list, I recommend you set it up to open that to-do list every-time you use OmniOutliner.
Just hold down the ⌘ (Command) and “,” keys and in the preferences window, check off “Open documents which were open last time you quit”.
That’s it! You can do as much customization as you want, but I prefer to keep my to-do lists very simple and easy to follow.
icon in the Formatting Palette.
