1. PPT – Power On Sequence
With the advances in laptop design, I thought it did not matter any more what order you turned on your presentation equipment. But a recent experience proved me wrong. It used to be that you needed to turn on the projector before your laptop so that when the laptop started up, it would be able to recognize that the projector was connected and set the display properly. But many laptops now have video systems that recognize a projector no matter what order the equipment is turned on or connected. But recently I helped a presenter with a new laptop who could not get the projector display working properly. It turns out that we had to shut down everything and it only worked when the projector was on before the laptop. So the lesson here is that most newer laptops don’t care what order you turn on the equipment, but if you are having a problem getting things to display properly, try restarting everything by turning the projector on first.
2. Outlook – Archive vs. Compress
I recently answered an e-mail from a reader on a topic that we thought others would want to know about. The reader was concerned about being able to find an e-mail in Outlook after using the compress feature (I wrote about compressing your Outlook folders earlier this year). Here’s what I wrote: “Archiving and compressing are two very different things in Outlook. Compressing (which I addressed in the newsletter) is just removing unused space from the outlook personal folder file. Nothing is changed in the file, just space that is currently unused (usually because of previous e-mails that were deleted months ago) is freed up. Archiving is indeed moving older items to an Archived Items folder. This folder is in the folder list along with the usual Outlook folder. It does not archive any items in your Inbox, only sent and deleted e-mails. You can search this folder by clicking on it in the folder list and then using the normal search tools. Archiving keeps your main outlook personal folder file down to a reasonable level.” I hope this helps others who are wondering what the difference is between compressing and archiving in Outlook.
3. Useful Resource – Create Shortcut Keys
For those of you who want to create shortcut keys that can automate many of your daily tasks, there is a utility that I just found out about that looks very promising. It is called AutoHotKey and it has great reviews from many people. It allows you to use some simple programming commands to write a shortcut or you can use a capture mode that allows you to avoid the programming. You can check it out at: http://www.autohotkey.com.