Raising the Bar Blog

Ligatures in Microsoft Word 2010

Being someone who is keen on design, desktop publishing and typography in general, I was really pleased to learn that Microsoft Word 2010 supports ligatures. That got me wondering, just how many people actually know about this? It is not so easy to find, you have to dig quite a bit and even then you may not immediately see much in the way of results. If you need to make anything that requires something a bit fancy, such as menus, invitations or certificates; or you just happen to like typography or calligraphy, it’s a really cool feature once you get it going, so here goes… Continue reading “Ligatures in Microsoft Word 2010”

Sharing Outlook Folders Including Inbox

There are two ways to share your Inbox in Outlook. I need to point out from the start that you need to be using an exchange server for this to work. You can’t use these methods to share your inbox from home. OK, now that’s out of the way let’s get down to it. The first method of sharing your inbox is delegation. It’ great if you just want to share your inbox, however if you want to share your sent items too, then you need to use another method – see method 2. Continue reading “Sharing Outlook Folders Including Inbox”

10 Basic Tips For PhotoShop

A long time ago, my first business was editing photographs for professional photographers. During this time I picked up many useful time saving tips in Photoshop that I would like to share with you. Most of them are basic however they can really save you some time in Photoshop and I use these tips and tricks all the time. If your not a keyboard shortcut fan then you really should learn. Some features require you to use keyboard short cuts to get the job done. Read on – 10 basic tips for Photoshop.

Continue reading “10 Basic Tips For PhotoShop”

Raster and Vector Graphics Explained in Illustrator

Illustrator, Adobe’s drawing and design program, can be used to design and create anything from a simple logo to complex illustrations including text, but underpinning all of that is the notion of the vector-based image. This is in complete contrast to the raster-based world of Photoshop (where everything is made of pixels), because in illustrator our images are object-based. Continue reading “Raster and Vector Graphics Explained in Illustrator”

Excel VBA Selection and Navigation Techniques – part 2

See previous article: Excel VBA Selection and Navigation Techniques

In the last article I showed you how to make some basic navigation and selection techniques using the macro recorder. In this article I’ll show you how you can navigate and select when the data is more complex. Blank cells can be difficult to deal with if you don’t know how. I’ll take you through some of the methods I use when coding in Excel VBA. Continue reading “Excel VBA Selection and Navigation Techniques – part 2”

Excel VBA Selection and Navigation

Microsoft Excel VBA Navigation People often ask me about selection and navigation techniques using keyboard shortcuts when I’m teaching Macros in an Advanced Excel course. However, when I’m teaching students how to program for the first time in an Excel VBA course:

Question: How do I select or navigate using Excel VBA?

In this article I’m going to show you some basic techniques on how to go about it. Continue reading “Excel VBA Selection and Navigation”

Case Study: Combining Webinar and Face to Face Training

The Requirement:

An integrator Upgraded their client from Windows XP and Office 2003 to Windows 7 and Office 2010 and engaged ‘Raising the Bar’ to up-skill their client’s staff and help them understand the key differences between the two versions of MS Office and the Windows platforms. The client also uses Project and they were upgraded from Project 2003 to Project 2010. The team, located in three different states of Australia were identified as being quite computer literate and are a Company of Project Managers. Continue reading “Case Study: Combining Webinar and Face to Face Training”

Office Clipboard

[caption id="attachment_143" align="alignleft" width="152"]

The Microsoft Office Clipboard. Keyboard shortcut (Alt, H, F,O)[/caption]

How many times have you done it? You need to copy several things from one excel spreadsheet to another or from one word document to another or even from one Microsoft Office application to another, so you copy paste, copy paste…… copy paste. I think you get the point. Well let me introduce you to one of those tools that is now a little hidden however it’s a real little gem of a tool when you need to use it. It’s the office clipboard. No, not the normal windows clipboard.

Bitmap Graphics in Photoshop

Everyone knows that Photoshop is an extremely powerful program which can be used to create a rich variety visual of materials for the web, print, animation and 3D. However for first-time users it can seem a bit of a monster, far more difficult to operate than other programs they have used. For starters, you might ask why you can’t just simply click on the things you see in a picture in order to select them? The reason is that, while the majority of programs used by most people on a day-to-day basis are vector-based, Photoshop is a raster-based, or bitmap program. In order to tame the beast, you need firstly to understand what that means and how it makes working in Photoshop different. By the way, the words Raster and bitmap are synonyms and thus can be used interchangeably. So what do they mean? Continue reading “Bitmap Graphics in Photoshop”

Case Study: Office 2003 to 2010 Upgrade Training

A local government organisation were upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 and Office 2003 to Office 2010.

Whilst the organisation has approximately 300 + staff in total, initially there were approximately 80 staff members to have the new platform and applications rolled out to them in a specific week. The 80 staff members were made up of three target groups:

To minimise the impact that the changeover might have, it was identified that the initial target groups would require some training designed to give users an overview of what the new desktop would look like, along with some basic knowledge of how to navigate within the applications that they predominately use: Excel, Word and Outlook.

In designing a solution for our client, we needed to consider timeframes and budget and we worked closely with the key stakeholders within the business to ensure that the end result was a true partnership.

The Requirement:

A local government organisation were upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 and Office 2003 to Office 2010.

In designing a solution for our client, we needed to consider time-frames and budget and we worked closely with the key stakeholders within the business to ensure that the end result was a true partnership. Continue reading “Case Study: Office 2003 to 2010 Upgrade Training”