A very short but useful tip this week. If you need to quickly resize a Window, remember that double-clicking the Titlebar of any Window (the horizontal part of a window across the top where the name of the document and applications usually appears) will toggle it between full screen size (the same as Maximize) and its former size (the same as Restore). If you want to resize a window the Titlebar is a bigger target than the caption buttons. Unfortunately this trick doesn’t work on a Mac.

You should be very comfortable with the basics of navigating PowerPoint when you are doing a presentation. It looks rather unprofessional when someone gets up in front of an audience and has difficulties in the middle of their presentation. Here are some helpful PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts that will help you navigate through your presentation.

One of the most helpful keyboard shortcuts is using the Space Bar to advance to the next slide. Of course, you can use Page Down, however the Space Bar is a much larger target and it’s easier to hit that if you are nervous or your hands are shaking, and that will help you get through the slides without hitting the wrong key.

Another helpful keyboard shortcut is hitting the Alt key plus the one or two or three digits that represent a slide number and then hit Enter to jump to a specific slide. You should know the numbers of the key slides in your presentation, whether that means memorizing them or having an outline or a list in front of you. That way, if you get to a point in your presentation where there are questions, and you need to jump back to a key slide, you are able to go jump directly to that slide rather than Page Up or Page Down through multiple slides.

Remember to “right click” to access a number of features on the context menu. There are a number of interesting features there that you can access that may help you in doing your presentation and just to show a few of those to you now…if you right click, it pops up a menu that looks something like this. There are a number of options presented to you. If you select “Go” and then by title, there is listing of both slide numbers and titles for your presentation. You can then click on a particular slide and you will jump directly to it.
There are a number of settings for changing your pointer options. You can change your pointer to a pen and change colours of that pen and then draw circles on your slide to highlight.

If you want to jump to your opening slide, at the end of your presentation (in order to emphasize a point), you can press “Home” to jump to the very first slide in your presentation. If for some reasons you don’t get to the end of your presentation, and you want to jump to the end, simply hitting the “End” key will jump you to the very end slide in your presentation.

Good luck with your next presentation.

Many installations of Microsoft Office have “Full menus” disabled. What does this mean? You only see limited menu choices (i.e., the ones you have used before and recently) when you click on File, Edit, View, Insert, etc.

When Full Menus is off you can’t see menu commands that you don’t use often or have never used before unless you click the two downwards pointing chevrons at the bottom of the menu – this forces Windows to show all the available commands on that menu. You can also double-click the menu to expand it.

When you expand one menu, all of the menus are expanded until you choose a command or perform another action. After you click an item on the expanded menu, the command is item added to the short version of the menu. If you do not use the command often, it is dropped from the short version of the menu.

Duh! This has to be the dumbest feature ever. Why hide menu items from yourself? This forces you into clicking a few extra times every time you want to use one of the hidden menu items. And for those just learning how to use Office, out-of-site means out-of-mind for menu items that they aren’t familiar with. This makes it harder for them to learn and use the true abilities of Office.

To work effectively or efficiently you should see all menu options all the time. To make this happen in any Office application, click on Tools, then Customize, then the Options tab, and check “Always show full menus”.

Few things are more finicky than typing case citations in various legal documents. Most people use toolbar buttons to turn italics and underling on and off. Reach for mouse, reach back, reach for mouse again, reach back… There is a better and must faster way.

With these three simple keyboard shortcuts case typing case citations will be a breeze:

• Press Ctrl+I to turn italics on/off
• Press Ctrl+U to turn underline on/off
• Press Ctrl+B to turn bold on/off

A side note for those that are not familiar with the syntax for describing keyboard shortcuts. Simply remember that a plus sign (+) between two or more keys means that you press those keys, in the order they are listed, almost simultaneously, moving from left to right. For example, a capital B would be described as Shift+b. You release them in the opposite order.

There are two important things to remember when using the above shortcuts: You can use them together and they are all toggles. That is, repeatedly pressing the noted key combination cycles between on and off. If you want to type a case name in the middle of a sentence with bold and underline do the following: When you get to the point the case name starts, simply press Ctrl+B, then Ctrl+I, then type the case name. To turn bold and underline off, press Ctrl+B and then Ctrl+I again, and continue with the sentence.

It is amazing how Google can search the web and find exactly what you are looking for. However, as amazing as Google is, you can do a few things to help it better find the information you are searching for – read on.

These things will help Google find the specific information you are searching for:

• Use multiple search terms: Narrow your results with more search terms as Google will return only pages that include all of your search terms.
• Make your search terms as specific as possible to the information you are looking for.
• Remember Google uses stemming technology which means it will search for words that are similar to your search terms. Thus a search for diet will also include results with diets, dieting, dietary and so on.
• Google searches are NOT case sensitive. Everything will be understood as lower case, so john smith, John Smith, and JoHn SmItH will all return the same results.
• To include common words in your search (by default they are not searched) put a space and a “+” sign in front of them e.g., Star Wars, Episode +1. Look in the top right corner of the Results screen to see the words Google searched on.
• Use a phrase search by using double-quotation marks around two or more search terms. This is really helpful if you’re searching for proper names (“George Washington”), lyrics (“the long and winding road”), famous phrases (“Four score and seven years ago”), and computer error messages (“Maximum_Wait_Objects_Exceeded”).
• Use negative terms to exclude some pages from your results e.g., London Arkansas –England.
• Phrase your query in the form of an answer. Think about it: you don’t want Web pages that ask your question, you want pages that answer your question. So instead of typing, Who decided Marbury vs. Madison?, type Marbury vs. Madison was decided by.

And if you want even more ways to tweak your search, on the Google homepage click on Advanced Search for help on more of the searching options Google gives you.

The Google Alerts service is one of many very helpful Google apps. It allows you to monitor the web for interesting new content and it will send you an email update of the relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• Being aware of your name or your firm name appearing in the new or on the web
• Monitoring a developing news story
• Keeping current on a competitor or industry
• Getting the latest on a celebrity or event
• Keeping tabs on your favourite sports teams

To create an alert, go to the Google Alerts page (www.google.com/alerts) and enter a text string that contains the name of the person or topic that you want to monitor (e.g., your name, your firm name, a client’s name or industry). Google Alerts will send an e-mail alert to you of Google news or Web search results based on the terms that you specified. You can configure it to deliver the alerts to you instantly, daily or weekly. On the news side, it searches several thousand news sources that the Google news page indexes. On the Web search side it searches all the Web pages that the Google search engine indexes.

On the Google site there are some great tips for getting just the alerts you really want to see.

Google Alerts is a great way to make sure you are aware if there is news or content posted on the Web that is about you, your clients, your firm or other topics of interest to you. In the past I have found it faster and more thorough than some of the commercial clippings services I have used.

An email exchange is not the same as a phone call or a face-to-face conversation. At the top of the hierarchy of human communications are face-to-face meetings, then phone calls, then voice mail, and lastly email. Face-to-face meetings have the most impact. Not only can you hear and talk back to the other person, you also have the ability to see gestures and facial expressions etc. On the phone you don’t see gestures, but you can hear the tone and emotion in the speaker’s voice. Email has the narrowest communications bandwidth – it is only black and white words on a screen.

Make sure the mode of communication you use fits the circumstance. When the news is big or bad, pick up the phone, walk down the hall or meet with your colleague or client face-to-face when more personal contact is called for.

Switching between open programs is one of the most frequent things we all do as we work on our computers. For this task most of us use a mouse to select a button on the task bar. There is a much faster way.

Pressing Alt+Tab (or on a Mac Option+Tab) will open a rectangular grey pop-up window in the centre of your screen. It will have an icon for each program that is running on your computer.

Press and hold down the Alt key, and then repeatedly press Tab to jump from one icon to the next in this pop-up window. To help you find the program you want, the text from the title bar of each window appears in a box at the bottom of the pop-up. Simply release both keys simultaneously when you get to the program you want.

And note: In this pop-up window, the icons are presented, from left to right, in the order you last looked at the respective programs. This means that the window you were in previous to the current one is just one Alt+Tab click away. This lets you jump back and forth between two programs in the blink of an eye. This is real handy if you are comparing info or cutting and pasting information between two programs.

Every lawyer and staff person in every law office should know this keyboard shortcut. Go and tell others at your firm about this tip.

And look for more keyboard shortcuts in future Slaw Tips on tech. Odds are your hands are on the keyboard most of the time. Taking them off to reach for the mouse just breaks your rhythm and slows you down. With keyboard shortcuts you can do almost everything you can do with a mouse much more quickly– the key is learning the shortcuts for the various programs you use. Stay tuned.

Google Translate is a free translation service that provides instant translations between 57 different languages. It can translate words, sentences, web pages and even whole documents (in a PDF, TXT, DOC, PPT, XLS or RTF format) between any combination of the 57 supported languages (See a list here).

Like most Google tools, it is extremely easy to use. Google Translate generates the translation by looking at the patterns in hundreds of millions of previously translated documents. Do you get perfect and sworn to be accurate translations you that you can take to court? No – but they are more than good enough to give you the gist of any text, document or website that you need to translate.

You can find Google Translate at translate.google.com

Or on the Google home screen click on the more… link and select Translate.

Adding some clipart, animations or photos is one of the best ways to make a presentation, newsletter or website look more professional. There are thousands of sites on the Internet that offer free and pay clip art.  While there is good content on some of these sites, many force you to deal with large amounts of advertising and many pop-ups.  Don’t bother with them.

The best source of free online clip art photos, animations and sounds, bar none, is the .  It has thousands of free images and media files, which you can very easily search by keywords and categories. Some of the photos are of professional quality.

Go to the site and check it out. You will like what you find there. And, if you see something you like, download it so you have it for future use and they rotate the content on the site.

And note, the licensing agreement for the site provides that you can freely reproduce the images as you wish, without having to worry about copyright or royalties, as long as you don’t sell them.  You can find this page at .

• Nicholas on Software Tools for Editing
• Jamie on Software Tools for Editing
• Steve Coughlan on ‘I Hope This E-Mail Finds You Well’
• Lyn on Womxn
• Celia Chandler on Gross Negligence

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