McCombs Office Solutions and Tips
Love the Microsoft Office tips you find on the MOST? Then check us out on YouTube, where we’ve posted all of our video tutorials.
http://www.youtube.com/mccombstrainers
And if you like learning through video tutorial, there are thousands more technology tutorials on YouTube. One of our favorites is Excel is Fun.
A few weeks ago people started announcing on Facebook, “who wants a google+ invite?” Comments followed, “what’s a google plus?” then, “it’s the thing that will make Facebook the new MySpace.” I remember once wanting to skip Facebook and wait for the next thing. Now, even my mom is really into it. The Google+ Project is attempting to take social networking to a new level with what they call making online sharing more like sharing in real life. It’s hard to say if it will catch on, but there are some very useful new features (especially if you already use gmail or other Google products). Here are the things I like about Google+…
The Look: Streamlined, simple, white and minimalist. No distractions with an easy to use interface.
The Circles: You have the option of putting your friends into different friendship circles or groups. When you post something you have the option of sharing with specific people. Family see family posts, work people see work friendly posts etc. You have a lot more control over who sees what and what you see from others.
The Hangout: This is a group video chat element that allows you to have a video conference with multiple friends simultaneously.
Google+ is now available to every one and of course it is free. If you already have a gmail or other Google products then you might want to try it. It’s connected with your gmail account so no new password to learn or signing up to do. It takes about a minute to fill out a Google profile. And of course you can always sync it to your Facebook account just to keep mom in the loop.
Take a tour of Google+ or learn more with videos.
The first popular online language translator was based on the Babel Fish, a fictitious animal which performs instant translations, from the Douglas Adams novel “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” There is a .com and a .org version out there, but the main translation program is now hosted by Yahoo! (babelfish.yahoo.com). You enter text in a box (up to 150 words), select a language to translate from and to, then click “translate.” You can also translate an entire web page by pasting in the URL of the site.
Google Translate has enabled translation across all their products. You can translate your search results, web pages, gmail messages, chat, text messages on your mobile phone, and entire documents on Google Docs. They have even launched a professional translator toolkit program. The Google Chrome browser has the translator built in and will prompt you when you access a foreign language site. Type “translate:” and then a word or phrase in the Google search box and it will return a translation at the top of the search results. Google Translate supports 52 languages.
The painting featured above is the Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563) and depicts the story that explains the origin of the world’s various languages. Technology seems to be at the beginning of the end of the language barrier. We are probably only a few mobile phone applications away from instant voice recognition and translation.
At the University of Texas we have an open internet system. Students can surf from site to site, easily finding the answers to almost any problem that comes along. It truly is the information age.
Having the history of human knowledge just a Google search away is great for helping us get our work done, but it can also be distracting. A wikipedia page can lead to another and another, then to a Facebook update, because we like to share what we have learned, then we glance a YouTube video we want to watch, then 2 hours have passed before we get back to working on the project we were working on in the first place. There is help!
The Google Chrome and FireFox browsers both have add on extensions that can give you the power to block sites from yourself. These features can help you get your work done and be grade saver for distractible online studying.
Google Chrome’s StayFocusd
StayFocusd is a productivity extension for Google Chrome that helps you stay focused on work by restricting the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites. Once your allotted time has been used up, the sites you have blocked will be inaccessible for the rest of the day. It is highly configurable, allowing you to block or allow entire sites, specific subdomains, specific paths, specific pages, even specific in-page content (videos, games, images, forms, etc).
FireFox: LeechBlock
LeechBlock is a simple productivity tool designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day. (You know: the ones that rhyme with ‘Blue Cube’, ‘Pie Face’, ‘Space Hook’). You can specify up to six sets of sites to block, with different times and days for each set. You can also set a password for access to the extension options, just to slow you down in moments of weakness!
It seems like almost everyone has a blog these days – my bank, my newspaper, even my mom. Most of the popular blog platforms are free or have free versions for use. Many people want to know which one to use to start a blog. Which is the easiest one to use? Which one can you put videos in? Which one has cool looking back grounds? Etc. etc. etc.
When you start looking at reviews the same platforms keep coming up. The nice thing is that they almost all have the same kind of features and are all fairly easy to go from 0 to blogging in half an hour (or less). I’m going to recommend three FREE platforms that appear in nearly every Top 10 list. I’ve extensively tested each of them and suggest you base your choice of blog platform on what kind of blog you want to make.
WordPress: http://wordpress.com/
WordPress feels like “professional” blog platform. It has every option you could possibly want on the control dashboard. With all the options WordPress is very powerful, but also comes with a slight learning curve. The themes are often geared toward a slick professional look and feel. If you have a business or want to be business-like, WordPress is the blog site for you. This blog, the McCombs Office Solutions and Tips, is a WordPress site.
Tumblr: http://www.tumblr.com/
Tumblr spelled without the “e” claims to be “the easiest way to blog.” The paired down user interface has just seven buttons (text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, video) that let you post just about anything you could put on the internet. Tumblr like the name implies is the “hip” blog platform. It’s a favorite for picture blogs and micro-bloggers who want to post many short posts. With almost 700 themes to choose from tumblr is a great platform for self expression. It’s kind of like FaceBook, Twitter and your iPhone all crashed into each other and started blogging.
Blogger: http://www.blogger.com/
Blogger is the “classic” platform. One of the first on the scene, with credited book deals and movie references galore. It is owned by Google so that makes connection with a Gmail account or other other Google applications easy. What was once thought of as a writer’s platform now has all the latest features, and with its easy start-up feature you can go from no blog to self publishing in under 15 minutes.
The best thing to do is read the about pages for each platform, look at some sample blogs, and experiment to find the platform that is going to best speak to the audience you are after.
