Tag Archives: Microsoft Word

Computers

Review: Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional Edition does clean OCR and is easy to use

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Anyone who’s purchased a multifunction printer or scanner recently will probably recognize the name FineReader, as the Sprint version ships with many such products. Obviously, there are deals being made, but there’s no questioning that the program also does a very nice job of OCR. Text extraction is great, though it’s not quite as good at recreating complex documents in Word and RTF files as Acrobat or OmniPage.

Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional ($170, 15-day free trial) is straightforward and easy to use. The main window shows a list of images in a column to the far left, the image being processed in a pane next to it, and the OCR’d text and elements in a pane on the right side. This side-by-side arrangement, shared with OmniPage Standard 18, makes it super-easy to spot mistakes and compare page elements.

Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional’s easy-to-understand interface makes it easy to use even if you’re new to OCR.

Abbyy FineReader 11 is fast, recognizes text in 189 languages, and outputs in a number of different formats including editable PDFs, Microsoft Word, ePub and even open-source PDF competitor DjVu.

FineReader created a searchable PDF of my yearbook scans just fine, but like OmniPage, it was over-zealous at rotating images trying to find text until I turned off this feature. With most OCR programs, you’re better off using Windows’ own Photo Viewer to rotate scans to their correct orientation before OCR’ing.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Computers

Review: LyX is an advanced but easy-to-use document processor based on LaTeX typesetting

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When one thinks of document editors, it’s usually Microsoft Word and Google Docs that come to mind. But in the world of word processors there are marquee names, and then there are some worthies not yet in the limelight. Advanced cross-platform document processor LyX has its merits. LyX is free and Open Source. LyX’s workflow is something of an adjustment from Microsoft Word, but learning it can pay off. The results are similar to professional typesetting.

Creating our first document on LyX is as simple as any other: Go to File – New. You can copy-paste or type your first text without bothering about any formatting. To start with formatting, we will say LyX uses Environments. Environments are lot like Microsoft Word and its use of Styles to format documents with consistency. But Environments give far greater control across a variety of document types.

Document processors are usually WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). LyX is WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean), though the frontend does not differ much from any other document editor. The way LyX controls the layout of the document lies in the background, where it uses powerful typesetting markup language LaTeX.

The default Environment is Standard. LyX has different Environments for typesetting sections, lists, sub-lists, verses, quotations, bibliography etc. Expanding the dropdown, we can choose to apply the appropriate ones and within a few clicks, our basic document now starts looking more professional. Different Text Styles can be used on the text. It can be previewed with a PDF reader.

The idea is to separate the content from its presentation. Precise control over layout is a must for academic and scientific authoring. This is where LyX comes into its own. LaTeX is complicated. LyX is the friendly GUI. The program handles the final presentation, leaving the writer with only the business of writing the content. The end result is a more attractive and consistent document.

Different documents like a book, a thesis, a letter etc. need to be typeset differently. LyX uses Document classes which tell it how to typeset the document so that we don’t have to bother about the distinctions. Each choice of a Document class also changes the Environments which go with it. Some are built-in but many Document classes and layout options are available online which allow us to extend LyX for all types of document processing needs.

LyX is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, with unofficial ports for OS/2 and Haiku. For a fresh installation on Windows, opt for the 200MB bundle, which is fully functional and includes the complete LaTeX distribution (MiKTeX) and a bibliography manager. A 35MB update installation is available for older versions of LyX with LaTeX already installed on the system.

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From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2034830/review-lyx-is-an-advanced-but-easy-to-use-document-processor-based-on-latex-typesetting.html#tk.rss_all

Do it yourself

Make Sure Readers Understand You by Testing Your Document's Readability Score

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There is a substantial number of helpful tools at your disposal in Microsoft Word when it comes to writing; grammar check, word count, dictionary, thesaurus, and tons more. One tool that doesn’t necessarily make itself obvious is testing your document’s readability. With this built-in tool, you can not only check your spelling and grammar, but also the reading level of your document.

Word uses two types of tests to determine your reading level. Although they use the same information (word length and sentence length), they have different factors that are taken under consideration.

Flesch… more

From: http://ms-office.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-sure-readers-understand-you-by-testing-your-documents-readability-score-0144465/

Do it yourself

How to Make Sure People Will Understand Your Writing by Testing Your Readability Score

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There is a substantial number of helpful tools at your disposal in Microsoft Word when it comes to writing; grammar check, word count, dictionary, thesaurus, and tons more. One tool that doesn’t necessarily make itself obvious is testing your document’s readability. With this built-in tool, you can not only check your spelling and grammar, but also the reading level of your document.

Word uses two types of tests to determine your reading level. Although they use the same information (word length and sentence length), they have different factors that are taken under consideration.

Flesch… more

From: http://ms-office.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-sure-people-will-understand-your-writing-by-testing-your-readability-score-0144465/

Do it yourself

How to Instantly Change Blocks of 'CAPITALIZED TEXT' in Microsoft Word to 'lowercase letters'

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You know that moment when you finally figure out something, but you figured it out years after you really needed it? Don’t you freaking hate that?! Thanks to Reddit user josawalk, whom I hate, yet love, I now know how to change chunks of text from all capital letters to lowercase.

There were so many times in school when I needed to copy text from some PDF or a source like JSTOR and all of the letters were in uppercase!

SOMETIMES I SIMPLY FORGOT THAT CAPS LOCK WAS ON AND WOULD HAVE TO RETYPE THAT WHOLE SENTENCE.

If only I knew about this easy MS Word keyboard shortcut, I would’ve saved so… more

Source: Wonder How To

Linux

The Perfect Desktop – OpenSUSE 12.3 (GNOME Desktop)

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HowtoForge: This tutorial shows how you can set up an OpenSUSE 12.3 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

The software I propose as default is the one I found easiest to use and best in their functionality – this won’t necessarily be true for your needs, thus you are welcome to try out the applications listed as alternatives.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

 

1 Preliminary Note

To fully replace a Windows desktop, I want the OpenSUSE 12.3 desktop to have the following software installed:

Graphics:

  • Pinta – open source drawing application modeled after Paint.NET
  • KolourPaint – paint application with elemental functions
  • The GIMP – free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop
  • Shotwell Photo Manager – full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop

Internet:

  • Firefox
  • Opera
  • Chromium – Google’s open-source browser
  • Thunderbird – email and news client
  • Evolution – combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions
  • Deluge – free cross-platform BitTorrent client
  • Transmission BitTorrent Client – Bittorrent client
  • qBittorrent – free alternative to µtorrent
  • Marble – desktop globe similar to google earth
  • GoogleEarth – Google’s desktop globe
  • Flash Player 11
  • FileZilla – multithreaded FTP client
  • Pidgin IM Client – multi-platform instant messaging client
  • Skype (only for 32 bit systems)
  • Dropbox Client – cloud storage
  • Gwibber Social Client – open-source microblogging client (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Office:

  • Adobe Reader
  • Evince – document viewer
  • Okular – document viewer
  • LibreOffice Writer – replacement for Microsoft Word
  • LibreOffice Calc – replacement for Microsoft Excel
  • GnuCash – double-entry book-keeping personal finance system, similar to Quicken
  • Scribus – open source desktop publishing (DTP) application

Sound & Video:

  • Banshee – audio player, can encode/decode various formats and synchronize music with Apple iPods
  • Amarok – audio player
  • MPlayer – media player (video/audio), supports WMA
  • Rhythmbox Music Player – audio player, similar to Apple’s iTunes, with support for iPods
  • gtkPod – software similar to Apple’s iTunes, supports iPod, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, iPod photo, and iPod mini
  • Sound Juicer CD Extractor – CD ripping tool, supports various audio codecs
  • XMMS – audio player similar to Winamp
  • Clementine – Amarok 1.4 fork
  • VLC Media Player – media player, plays all kinds of videos (video/audio)
  • Totem – media player (video/audio)
  • Xine – media player, supports various formats; can play DVDs
  • Winff – free video converter
  • SoundConverter – free audio converter
  • Soundkonverter – free audio converter
  • K3B – CD/DVD burning program
  • Brasero – CD/DVD burning program
  • Audacity – free, open source, cross platform digital audio editor
  • Kino – free digital video editor
  • dvd::rip – full featured DVD copy program
  • Multimedia Codecs

Programming:

  • Bluefish – text editor, suitable for many programming and markup languages
  • Eclipse – Extensible Tool Platform and Java IDE

Other:

  • VirtualBox – lets you run your old Windows desktop as a virtual machine under your Linux desktop, so you don’t have to entirely abandon Windows
  • TrueType fonts
  • Java
  • gedit – simple text editor

The software provided in the above list covers most of the basic tasks one might need to do on their desktop computers, sometimes there are multiple choices for same functionality. If you know which one you like best, you obviously don’t need to install and test the other applications, however if you like choice, then of course you can install more than one.

I’m using the OpenSUSE 12.3 Live-DVD in this tutorial to set up the system. You can download it from here: http://software.opensuse.org/123/en

I will use the username howtoforge in this tutorial, and I will download all necessary files to howtoforge’s desktop which is equivalent to the directory /home/howtoforge/Desktop. If you use another username, please replace howtoforge with your own username. So when I use a command such as

cd /home/howtoforge/Desktop

you must replace howtoforge.

 

2 Installing The Base System

Download the OpenSUSE 12.3 Live-DVD iso image, burn it onto a DVD, and boot your computer from it. Select Installation.

OpenSUSE

Continue reading this article at it’s original source:
http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-opensuse-12.3-gnome-desktop

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Linux Today

Linux

Problems passing strings within an array

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By hungryd

i have a list of apps that i need to forcequit and, from time to time, that list changes. perfect excuse to manage a single array! however, my strings with spaces aren’t passing as i’d like them to. here’s the simple script:

Code:
#!/bin/sh

#-----Array
apps=( firefox-bin firefox JavaApplicationStub groupwise "Google Chrome" "Microsoft Word" )

for i in "${apps[@]}"
do
killall $i
done
exit 0

when i generate verbose feedback, i’m seeing each app in question quit EXCEPT for those with spaces. on a mac, in the command line, i have to type the following to forcequit word and chrome:

Code:
killall Microsoft Word
killall Google Chrome

but i can’t seem to find a way to paste the correct syntax into the array to get these applications to quit as the others do. in the above script example, the result just says:

“+ for i in ‘”${apps[@]}”‘
+ killall ‘Microsoft’ Word
No matching processes were found”

any thoughts on what i might be missing?

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at The UNIX and Linux Forums

Computers

Review: HVD Comic Serif is a wholesome hero of a font

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“So many designers hate Comic Sans,” designer Hannes von Döhren of HVD Font says in email. “They think people who don’t know design are overusing this funny little friendly font, which is nearly every time out of place.” His Comic Serif is a (PostScript) OpenType font that’s an interesting alternative if you want to stick with the comic book theme. The slab serif letters are drawn monoline, but with a fun, easy-going attitude.

Just like its archnemesis, Comic Serif is very legible, even at small text sizes, and can easily be used equally as a display or poster font. However, although the two Comic fonts have a vaguely related heritage, and both include the handwritten styles for lowercase a and g (rather than letter press style), Comic Serif probably isn’t going to be a good choice for beginning readers, mainly because of the heavy weight of the font and the short descenders, which cause the heavy slab serifs to almost not fit in the glyph.

Comic Serif is regular (400) weight, although it seems heavier, possibly because of the short ascenders and descenders relative to the x-height, and x-height slightly above the median. Plus, there’s no bold version of the font, so bolding the font in a text editing program like Microsoft Word or Open Office makes the letters almost run together. That said, Comic Serif includes a crazy 11,940 kerning pairs, so whatever your copy, it’s going to be well spaced; plus all upper and lowercase glyphs, plus numbers, punctuation, many mathematical and scientific glyphs, and Eastern, Central, and Western European language support.

As designer von Döhren suggests, appropriate use is key to not looking out of place, whatever font you use. So even though it includes scientific and mathematical glyphs, don’t use Comic Serif (or any font with the word Comic in its name, for that matter) for grant proposals, dissertations, or signs at MIT. Comic Serif includes installable embedding, and is free for personal and commercial use.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Computers

Office showdown: Microsoft Office 365 vs. Google Apps

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The war between Google and Microsoft is heating up. Each tech giant offers a productivity suite serving the essentials for serious work online: word processing, spreadsheets, email, and calendars. Should you ally with Google Apps for Business, or root for Microsoft’s Office 365 for Small Business?

My experience with both brands’ productivity tools reflects the workflows many small businesses face. In 2007, with staff scattered across several countries, my editorial company started using Google Apps for Business. It offered email, plus shared text documents and spreadsheets all under our company domain name and logo. Meanwhile, on the desktop, we used Microsoft Word and Excel, particularly for complex documents that we shared with clients.

If we were starting over today, we would seriously consider Microsoft’s Office 365 for Small Business. For years Microsoft wasn’t putting significant functionality online, but next week’s release of Office 365 Small Business Premium is a big step forward.

Google and Microsoft each allow personal and business use of their online platform, as well as simultaneous logins to multiple accounts in different browser tabs. Beyond that, however, their platforms differ greatly in usability, functionality, and mobile support. Read on to discover the standout features and surprising weak points of each.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Computers

Adobe releases emergency patch for Windows and OS X systems

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Adobe recently released an emergency update for Flash Player on all platforms after two zero-day bugs were discovered in the wild targeting Windows and Mac OS X computers. The vulnerabilities allowed hackers to hijack both Windows PCs and Macs. Adobe recommends all users to update their systems as soon as possible.

The first vulnerability, CVE-2013-0633, tricks users into downloading a Microsoft Word document sent via e-mail. As you might expect, the document contains malicious SWF (flash’s file extension) content that can then infect a user’s system. This exploit targets the ActiveX version of Flash Player for Windows, Adobe said.

The second exploit, CVE-2013-0634, targets Firefox and Safari users on Mac OS X by directing users to Websites containing malicious Flash content. This vulnerability is also being used against Windows users in a similar manner to the first exploit. Namely, malicious documents delivered via e-mail.

So there’s nothing new here in terms of malware delivery, but you should update your Flash Player software as soon as possible if it isn’t set to update automatically. Even though the newly patched weaknesses target Mac and Windows users, Adobe has also released updates for Flash Player on Linux and all versions of Android from 2.X to 4.X (basically, everyone running Flash on Android).

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Computers

Review: Update Your Shortcuts With Broken Shortcut Fixer

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With the plethora of free software available these days, we all install and then uninstall a huge amount of stuff. The problem with this is that quite often, a lot of shortcuts and other detritus is left behind, clogging things up and making things a mess. The problems aren’t confined to uninstalling, either. When you move things around in your computer you often end up breaking shortcuts pointing to the old location. You may not immediately realize that, and later when you need the file or program, you click the shortcut only to get the dreaded “the item has changed or moved” error. Luckily, there’s one free piece of software that can help with these scenarios: Broken Shortcut Fixer.

A shortcut is a link which allows you to start a program or open a file from a different location than the directory that program or file lives in. So for example, you may have Microsoft Word in the Windows folder but a shortcut link will be on the desktop, so you can start a new file right away.  But these shortcuts are only good if the file it points to stays in place. If you move it, the shortcut link is broken, because it is still pointing to the old location.

Broken Shortcut Fixer is a small free app that scans your computer drives, looks for shortcuts and then determines if they are broken or not. If they are broken, it tries to fix the shortcut by looking for the target file or program and linking the shortcut to it. If they can’t be fixed, it displays it in a list for you to review so you can decide if it can be fixed manually. If all else fails, it gives you a big delete button to blast them off into digital oblivion.

To find broken links, just choose your drive in the lower left of the UI, and click “scan shortcuts”. Any shortcuts that the app was unable to fix will appear in the main section for you to review and delete.

To use it, you start up Broken Shortcut Fixer and choose which computer drive you want to scan.  Then press “scan shortcuts” and let it do its work. Since I had just reinstalled my entire Windows system, it only found one broken shortcut. Maybe I should have tested this the day before when my system was the digital equivalent of a junkyard.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Computers

Brand your business on a budget with fantastic free fonts

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From logos to letterhead to websites, a consistent look helps your customers identify you. But branding your business can be expensive, and many small businesses can’t justify the outlay. To create a consistent look for your business—without breaking the bank—consider using the same typeface for all of your communications and materials. We found five fonts to set the right note without blowing your budget.

Getting down to business with fonts

Certainly, a popular typeface or font like Arial, Times New Roman, or many of the others included with Microsoft Word will be Web-safe—but will it set you apart as the go-to company? Your typeface needs to be more than just legible: It helps define your business. Your customers will have an emotional response to your typeface, and unless you’re a preschool, they may not appreciate the levity of Comic Sans.

Make sure you’re choosing a typeface that comes complete with italic (or “oblique,” identical glyphs that slant just as italics) and bold faces at the very least. Many popular sans serif fonts—for example, Tahoma—do not have separate italic or oblique faces. When you apply “italic” formatting to Tahoma, your operating system creates a synthetic version of the font in the oblique style. You’ll encounter the same problem with many of the display fonts—serif or sans serif—you can download. Synthetic fonts won’t print as expected on many high-end devices, so if you want to print commercially, either now or down the road, choose carefully.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Computers

Word vulnerability tops Microsoft’s targets for Patch Tuesday

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A flaw in Microsoft Word ranks among the top security problems addressed by December’s Patch Tuesday fixes, closing a hole that allows remotely executing malicious code on targeted machines regardless of whether users open the infected file. The bulletin is one of five marked critical by Microsoft in its advanced notification about vulnerabilities this month, and several security experts say the Word vulnerability is the top priority.

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“In this case we assume the ‘critical’ rating comes from Outlook, which can be configured to use Word to visualize documents in its preview pane,” says Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek. “This is an automatic mechanism that does not require user interaction. In any case, this will be an important bulletin to watch out for.”
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Source: PCWorld