Tech and life

I listened to a podcast recently which got me thinking about free versus paid software and online services. I’ve blogged about free software and alternatives to commercial programs before but Tracy Holt made a great point on The Techie Geek Podcast 90. Tracy and Russ were discussing freeing up space in web email accounts rather than paying for unlimited storage. Tracy ran through his lengthy routine for archiving emails then admitted he would have been better off paying $50/year for unlimited email storage which he does now:

‘My time is probably worth more than all the time I spent trying to free up space’

He’s right and that applies to software as well as online services, particularly if you run a small office/home office (SOHO). If buying software or online services or upgrading from free to premium versions is going to save you time in the long run, that precious time saved is also going to make you more productive and you should earn more in the same time available. So far this has definitely applied to me in my day job as a freelance copy editor. For example, I’ve invested a small amount in two commercial macros for MS Word which both save me a lot of time in the long run.

MegaReplacer is a batch search and replace macro for Word. You add a bunch of words you want to search for in a file and their replacements, for example, commonly misspelled words and when you run the macro it  goes through the file prompting at each occurrence whether you want to replace it. It’s essential for an editor. Without the macro, you just can’t do that quickly and you’ll most certainly miss some words anyway.

ReferenceChecker is a macro for Word to spot inconsistencies between reference citations in text and the reference list. It’s not important to understand exactly what the macro is doing unless you’re a copy editor, but believe me, it’s a lot quicker than going through the text manually and checking each citation against the reference list, and vice versa.

So particularly if you run a small office/home office, consider investing in commercial software or add-ons and weigh up the differences between premium and free versions of software and services and see if the increased productivity they’ll bring will save you money in the long run.

Have you invested in commercial software or add-ons, or paid for online services to increase productivity? Let us know below.

You’ve probably sometimes entered a search phrase on Google and it’s returned a number of hits where that search phrase perhaps isn’t in the title of the webpage, but occurs somewhere on that page. If you’ve actually searched for a phrase by enclosing your keyphrase in quotes and it’s a long page, it can be time consuming to find the phrase on the page, but there’s a quick way to do it. Install the Google Quick Scroll extension in Google Chrome browser and once you choose a page from the search results, a box will pop up in the bottom right corner of the browser window enabling you to click the phrase and jump straight to the first occurrence of the phrase on the page. And if you haven’t enclosed your keywords in quotes, the extension will search for the best matched fits to your keywords on the page.
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What’s uninteresting content? Well that’s obviously pretty subjective. One thing’s for sure – we’re constantly being bombarded with too much online information, whether on Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, etc. and we just can’t cope with it all. One way to ease the information firehose and stay more productive is to filter out content which we’re really just not interested in based on the appearance of certain ‘switch-off’ keywords in blog titles, tweets and stuff posted on Facebook. This can be done relatively easily with userscripts – these are just small bits of JavaScript which customize how a webpage displays. Thousands are already available at  Userscripts.org but don’t panic, these can be easily installed in your browser. I’ll be looking at Firefox and Chrome here as these are the two browsers I work with but they may also work with other browsers.
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I’ve been using MS Word for about 10 years and thought I knew most of its important features, but I didn’t know about the Spike!  I found out about this great feature recently in a blog post on Help Desk Geek. It allows you to quickly rearrange non-contiguous blocks of text or other items in your Word document. Basically, instead of using the simple cut and paste (Ctrl X, Ctrl-V) which I’m sure you’re all familiar with, you can use Word’s in-built Spike feature to ‘multiple cut’ items and then paste them all in order in a single operation.

Let me explain. The Spike allows you to add multiple selections (by cutting, not copying) to Word’s clipboard in the order you want, then to paste them all at once. So for example if you have an unordered list of say references which you want in alphabetical order, you just cut each selection in turn in the order you want using Ctrl-F3. They are added in that order to the Spike. No need to paste items individually, just keep adding your selections to the Spike. When you’ve finished cutting the items, you paste them all at once at your insertion point using Ctrl-Shift-F3.  Everything is pasted in one operation with all the selections in the order in which they were cut.

Try it out and see what you think. Definitely a time saver if you find yourself frequently rearranging selections in Word. And this feature works in all versions of Word from 97 to 2010. These are the main features of Spike but for a full how-to on using it, head over to the Help Desk Geek post. And let us know how you use the Spike in the comments.

Image credit: quinn.anya

Computers. Don’t you just love them! Time rushes by when you are in front of that screen. Oftentimes I’ve let the fire die, or the potatoes boil to a soggy mush as I try to solve a computer problem or devise a workaround. And I’m not alone. They’re supposed to make you more productive… save you time, but sometimes I wonder. I loved this recent post on thrive as the author tried to do some photo editing and the catalogue of problems that ensued and the time wasted – I could identify with so much there.

We’ve all been there – a seemingly simple software problem to sort out or routine to master but it can take an eternity to get a satisfying result. In my experience, with the best will in the world, even after reading software help files, checking the preferences, often you may not get the direct easy solution you wanted but have to resort to a workaround or even have to hunt for an alternative program. Many’s a time I’ve found that with computers, for some reason to get from A to B you have to go via C and D!

Some applications like Photoshop are complex and you need to invest a fair bit of time to master them. Then when these apps are updated, they lose functionality or do things differently and you have to relearn stuff. Other applications just aren’t intuitive enough. I’ve often found that during a software installation or when using an app, the choice of options and the result of choosing an option aren’t clearly explained. I’m often left scratching my head wondering what exactly will happen if I chose a particular option, check a box or follow a particular route – and of course often the wrong choice is made and you have to start over losing more time. If I get the wrong result when using an app, very often I just have to work though the possible options by trial and error, changing one item at a time until I get the right result – more time gone. And of course don’t change two or three things at once as a shortcut – invariably, if you solve it you won’t know exactly which tweak solved it.

But having said that, there’s a great sense of achievement when you crack it no matter how long it takes. I’ve blogged some of my tips when I’ve solved a PC problem so as to try and help people through the same problems – and that’s my point here. When I started with PCs many years ago, there was no real help other than the good old manual, if that. Nowadays, we have so much help, from a quick Google search to tech forums, Twitter and sites like Mahalo Answers and MakeUseOf Answers where you can ask tech questions.

And when you’ve cracked that problem, be sure to make a note of what you did in something like Evernote, so you know for next time. There’s nothing worse that sitting down 3 or 4 months later faced with the same problem and scratching your head wondering how you solved it last time. Use your PC to remind you!

Have you solved a PC issue that’s given you a great sense of achievement? How do you solve PC problems? What do you find frustrating and a real time sink? Have you ever given up in disgust and taken drastic action! Have you resorted to changing your operation system or finding new software? Tell us in the comments!

photo credit: ap