Steps Recorder is built in to Windows and is excelent for recording clicks when perfoming tasks on a PC. Saves the results to an .mht file too. Great … except … 300 images, 1366×2000-and-something plus 48MB causes an issue if you try opening in a browser. “OK, I’ll open it in Word”. Well, yeeessss … except …
Archive for Word Processors
Notepad++ User Defined Languages
For editing regular text I do like Notepad++, a text editor with colour syntax highlighting for many different programming languages built in – and a lot of other languages for which people have written User Defined Language (UDL) plugins. Neat … only … when I came to try to make one I found little documentation and what there was was fractured, distributed and dammit just incomplete (incomplete = Can’t find even a snifter via Google in an hour). Indeed, in the UDL dialog of the latest notepad++ (Aug 2015) is a link to a temporary documentation site – which ceased in 2012 with a message “New, improved documentation site will replace this one in near future.”
So [cracks knuckles] lets try and work it out.
LibreOffice Tips
At work I use Microsoft Word. At home, its LibreOffice which has mostly different uses and means I often forget how to do some of the things in LibreOffice that I do without thinking in Microsoft Word. So I thought I’d capture a few of them here, mainly for my benefit but I guess others may find useful.
Custom Fields in MS Word
Often in a document you need to include text that is repeated throughout a document and just _know_ someone will want to change them later. Or perhaps you have a document template and want to use custom fields that the template user can fill in.
Enter custom fields.
Inserting these fields is a little non-obvious as they are buried under the title “quick parts”.
This brings up a dialog – but we aren’t quite there yet ! You need to select “DocProperty” in the left hand list after which the field properties appear containing the names of the fields. As can be seen, a number of fields have already been defined.
Having finally managed to find these fields wouldn’t it be fantastic if there was an [Add] button so you could add your own field for your own text. But if Micro$oft did that life would be too easy and we can’t have that ! Indeed, even the mighty Google couldn’t find an answer !
Thats because creation is buried in a completely different part of the program. Select the main menu button (top-left of application), select “Prepare” and select “Properties”
When you do this, an additional panel appears just below the menu bar but above the actual document page.
The more observant among you may recognize some of these fields – such as “Author” – from the insert-field dialog.So we are on the right track ! Click on the “Document Properties” drop-down and select “Advanced Properties” and another tabbed dialog appears.
Honest, we are getting close now ! Select the “Custom” tag and voilà ! Enter a name for your field and a value and press the [Add] button.
The field will now appear in the insert-field dialog. (Note that as well as text, you can instead specify a number, date or even Yes/No).
It is apparently possible to have your custom field appear on the document properties panel. For example, every organized organization will number their documents so wouldn’t it make sense to have a “Document number” field [hint-hint Micro$oft - please add one!].Well, get out your cheque book (heh, showing me age!) and pay Micro$oft for InfoPath and apparently you can design your document information panel.
Landscape. No, portrait. D’oh! I mean landscape !
I use a word processor in several very different environments. One of these involves flipping back and forth between landscape and portrait page orientations and is a trivial task in MS Word. But where is it in LibreOffice Writer ?
Answer : Select menu [Insert] -> [Manual Break] and in the dialog that pops up tick the [Page Break] radio button AND, in the “Style” box below it, select “Landscape” (which is towards the bottom of the list).Switching back to portrait is the same method except you set the style to “Default”.
If you use MS Word for a while – as we do at work – then its easy to forget how so I’ve made a note here.