Issue #16 September 24, 2002

1. Finding e-mails

Most of you have get more e-mails than I do, and One of the frustration we all have is that when we have a large number of e-mails in a folder, it gets hard to find the one we are looking for. Fortunately, most e-mail programs have an advanced find feature that can find e- mails that contain certain keywords in the subject or text. For example, in Microsoft Outlook, there is an Advanced Find tools that allows you to specify what fields you want to search, which folders and what keywords you want to locate. The tool then finds all e- mails meeting your criteria in a list that you can then click on to expand any e-mail. You can use criteria on fields such as date sent, who sent it, the subject or the text of the e-mail. This allows you to find a required e-mail quickly and simply.

2. Adobe Acrobat compatibility tip

If you are distributing documents in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, let me share an experience I had recently. When I released some of my recent free checklist products on the web site, I had people respond that when they tried to view the page it gave them an error about font encoding. After some investigation, I found out that they were still using Acrobat Reader version 3. In Acrobat version 4 they changed the font encoding mechanisms for some fonts, and version 3 cannot read the file properly. I have now changed all of my Adobe PDF files to be compatible with version 3 so that this does not happen again. To change the compatibility level when converting documents from Microsoft Word, go to the Acrobat menu in Word and select Change Conversion Settings. Then click on the Edit Conversion Settings button and it will allow you to set the file to be compatible with version 3. This will help ensure that your Adobe PDF documents can be read by people who are using any Acrobat Reader version 3 or above.

3. Useful Resource – Presentation Display Problems

Have you ever had an experience where you have all your presentation equipment set up and for some reason you get no display on the screen or the image you see is of poor quality? This must be one of the areas I get asked about most often. So what I have done is write two articles on the web site that cover this area. One is on the six most common problems that cause no image to be displayed (the top six are: laptop display toggle incorrect, loose cables, projector input source incorrect, power not on to projector, projector in standby mode and projector cover loose). The other article is on the five most common problems that cause poor displays (the top five are: resolution mismatch between computer and data projector, laptop not able to dual display, poor room lighting, weak projector bulb and poor slide color choice). For more details on these problems and how to fix them, read these two articles in the Free Articles section of the web site at: http://www.communicateusingtechnology.com.