Rule the office

Share and share alike

Need to use the same logo in documents and presentations? Store frequently used text or images in Microsoft Office 2004’s Scrapbook. In Word or Excel, select View: Toolbox; then click on the icon at the top left of the palette to reveal the Scrapbook. In Entourage or PowerPoint, select Tools: Scrapbook. Add something to the Scrapbook by selecting a bit of text or an image in a document and then clicking on Add in the Scrapbook palette. To paste an item into any Office document, select it in the Scrapbook and click on Paste.—Kirk McElhearn

Make pasted text match

When you paste text from Web pages into Word, you’d probably like the pasted text to match the text in your document. In Word X, select Edit: Paste Special, select Unformatted Text, and click on OK. This pastes the text without any formatting; it should pick up the formatting of the location where you pasted it. If you use Word 2004, paste the text and then click on the Paste Options button that appears below the pasted text (it looks like a clipboard). Select Match Destination Formatting in the resulting menu.—KM

Save document images

If your Word 2004 documents contain graphics that you want to use elsewhere, you can drag the images to the desktop or to a folder, but they’re saved as picture clippings, which aren’t easy to share. Instead, just control-click on an image in a document, select Save As Picture from the contextual menu, and choose a file format from the Format menu.—KM

Let Excel do the work

No-Sweat Data Entry There’s no need to type out a standard data series in Excel. Just type the first couple of entries, select, and drag —Excel is smart enough to fill in the rest of the series.

Instead of entering a list of standard data in Excel, let the AutoFill feature fill in the blanks. Type the first couple of entries in contiguous cells—for example,

January

and

February

. Select the cells you’ve filled; then click and move the cursor to the bottom right of the selection. When the cursor becomes a handle, drag down (or across). Tooltips display the next entries for the series. When you’ve reached the end, release the mouse button, and the cells will fill (see “No-Sweat Data Entry”). Try this with more-complicated patterns, too.—KM

Use Office Equations in Keynote 3

Want to include complex equations in your Apple Keynote 3 presentation? If you own Office, get a helping hand from the Microsoft Equation Editor (one of Office’s installation options). Open Word, choose Insert: Object; then choose Microsoft Equation from the resulting dialog box. The Equation Editor will open. Type your equation into it, using the editor’s tools to add plenty of equation-y goodness. Then select the equation and copy and paste it into a Keynote slide. It appears as a resizeable graphic.—Tom Negrino

Dazzle ’em

The traditional laser pointer pales in comparison to The Omni Group’s OmniDazzle ($15), which lets you zoom in on, highlight, and annotate your screen during your PowerPoint 2004 or Keynote 3 presentations (see “Focus In”). To enable OmniDazzle in Keynote 3 or later, open Keynote’s Slideshow preference pane, and select both the Allow Exposé, Dashboard And Others To Use Screen option and the Show Pointer When The Mouse Moves option. See OmniDazzle’s hardware requirements.—TN

Hide Keynote’s movie controls

Focus In Expand your presentation powers by pairing The Omni Group’s OmniDazzle with PowerPoint or Keynote. This utility lets you underscore your points by highlighting a part of the screen and dimming the rest.

When there’s a QuickTime movie on a Keynote 3 slide, the movie controller appears when you move your mouse. That’s handy if you need to pause the movie, but it can also be distracting. To prevent the controller from appearing, make a copy of the current master slide and place the movie on the master slide, rather than on a regular slide. You can still control the movie from the keyboard. Press J to rewind, L to fast-forward, and K to play or pause.—TN

Go beyond bullet points

The best PowerPoint presentation I’ve ever seen didn’t contain a single bullet point. It was given by Scott McCloud, who wrote Understanding Comics (Perennial Currents, 1994). This brilliant book will help you understand all forms of visual communication, including PowerPoint and Keynote—and it’s written mostly as a comic book! Trust me on this one. I’m also a fan of the Beyond Bullets Weblog, by Cliff Atkinson.—TN

Use multiple inspectors at once

If you work with Apple’s Pages or Keynote, you know how important the Inspector palettes are—they give you access to settings for text, images, layouts, charts, and more. If you click on the Inspector button in the programs’ toolbars, however, only one Inspector window appears or disappears. To open multiple Inspector palettes choose View: New Inspector as many times as necessary.—KM

Control Pages’ Template Chooser

By default, Pages 2 displays the Template Chooser dialog box when you open the program, or when you create a new document (File: New). Using the program’s preferences (Pages: Preferences), you can make the program always use the Blank template (or another template if you prefer). When you want to see the Template Chooser dialog box again, hold down the option key when you select File: New.—KM

Count ’em Up

If you’re disappointed that Apple’s TextEdit can’t give you a word count for the document you’re writing, Paul Gorman’s free NanoCount will improve your mood. This little program counts the number of words in the active TextEdit document (in Mac OS X 10.2 or later), updating the word count at the frequency you choose. (Just what you need for National Novel Writing Month in November!)—KM

Fix missing PDF links in Preview

If a PDF’s hot links don’t work in Preview, make sure you have the Scroll tool selected. Choose Tools: Scroll Tool, press Command-1, or click on the Move Tool in the toolbar.—Adam C. Engst

Fax Faster

The quick way to send a document by fax in OS X 10.4 is to press Command-P, click on PDF, and select Fax PDF from the drop-down menu. OS X creates a PDF of your document and then sends it as a fax, using your Mac’s built-in modem. If you don’t have a built-in modem, sign up for an e-mail-to-fax gateway service, such as the $15-per-month jConnect Premier. The service’s free software adds a Fax With J2 Messenger command to the PDF menu.—JK

Control the flow

In Keynote 3 or PowerPoint 2004, it’s usually better to control the show’s progress from the keyboard than to fool with a mouse or trackpad. Here are the programs’ most useful shortcuts.—TN

Sum it up with Calculator

Whether you’re performing complex equations or tallying up the profits from your latest bake sale, don’t forget Calculator (/Applications). Its Paper Tape window (View: Show Paper Tape) displays a running summary of your calculations, but it can do much more than that. Say you’ve just made a calculation, and you want to redo it with different data. Click in the paper tape, change any of the numbers, and click on Recalculate Totals. When you type directly in the paper tape, use the usual opera-tors (+, -, *, and /), as well as parentheses.—KM