Omnivorous Surfer

New-year-resolution time is fast approaching, and while I do not really make resolutions...no sense in making resolutions you won't keep...I do try to make some improvements. I ran across this Zen Habits post somehow today, and though it doesn't deliver anything earth shattering or even new, it does present an interesting short list of 10 quick and easy changes to make along with suggested ways to accomplish them. Why read it? Well, I hope I'm not the only one who could do with a little simplification these days!

To give you an idea what's there so you can decide if you want to go read it (in case you already do all these things!), here are the 10 "things"...

1. Make a short list.
2. Drop 1 commitment.
3. Purge a drawer.
4. Set limits.
5. Simplify your to-do list.
6. Free up time.
7. Clear your desk.
8. Clear out your email inbox.
9. Move slower.
10. Single task.

I also enjoyed reading another post, Haiku Productivity: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential referenced in #4, which describes putting limits on everything. I like this one, as this is something that causes me difficulty. I like to do too many things and I'm not always good at prioritizing. Perhaps thinking about the content of this post might encourage me to make some moves in the right direction. But I'm NOT making any resolutions to do this!

I keep learning more about some of Google's features and wonder why I never found them before. Some of them would have made my  searches more efficient.

Perhaps you, like me, already knew about define:. In case this one is new to you, entering define:abstruse will list definitions of "abstruse" from a number of web sources.

Here are some more (notice that there is no space between the colon and the web page URL or term) :

link:  will give you a listing of the web pages with links to the website you specified, for example, link:www.lumosity.com. This was also an advanced operator we used years ago in AltaVista and is one way to check the validity of the information provided on a website.

allintitle: will give you a list of all the websites with all of the specified query words in their title. For example, allintitle:brain games will give you a list of all websites with both "brain" and "game" in their titles.

intitle: will list documents that contain the first word in their title. Including a second word will limit the listing to those sites which also contain that word anywhere in the document. For example, intitle:prezi teach will result in a listing of all sites with "prezi" in the title and the word "teach" or "teacher" or "teaching" in the page text or title.

allinurl: and inurl: work exactly like allintitle: and intitle:, except that they look in the URL (Internet address) for the search term. For example, try inurl:washington rainforest to find websites that have "washington" in the URL and "rainforest" or "rain forest" either in the title or on the page.

related: will show a list of websites similar to the specified site. Entering related:mindomo.com will give you a listing of other websites which also create mind maps. I think this one in particular will really be useful!

There's much more power in Google than I've been taking advantage of. I'll have to see what else I've been missing.

Did you know that you can actually "generate" multiple email addresses using one Gmail address? While some sites won't recognize them, Gmail will ignore when delivering messages to you anything following periods or a plus sign. This means that anything addressed to you as  youraddress...1@gmail.com, youraddress..ab@gmail.com, or youraddress+mile38@gmail.com will be delivered to your youraddress@gmail.com inbox.

I had seen this recommended as a possibility for creating multiple student accounts on application sites and this morning looked it up for someone who requested my assistance. Rather than plagiarize the information from blog posts I read this morning, here are the links to them:
Use Gmail Generate Unlimited Email Addresses includes several other uses for this feature.
2 hidden ways to get more from your gmail address

I almost never post application tips, but I was so happy to find this one and it's so easy I had to share. I felt kind of foolish that I hadn't already noticed it. I must admit that I had included a drop cap in a document recently by using a text box with a single enlarged capital letter; the result was less than satisfactory, but I used it anyway.

In Word 2003, simply type the letter, select it, and choose Drop Cap from the Format menu. In Word 2007, use the Insert ribbon and choose Drop Cap from the Text group. In either one, you select from Dropped (see the example above) or In Margin, which keeps the entire paragraph indented.

This was a tip in a blog post from TechRepublic.

TechRepublic is a wonderful source for nearly all things technology for me, and this tip really will be useful. In a nutshell, it will do a quick look up for you in a matrix of data. For example, I have a huge...well, really large...spreadsheet of codes and other information for several hundred individuals. When I need to look up  specific data for one individual, I do a find for the name and then look across to find the data, which may be a few columns over. Using the tip in this TechRepublic article, I can prepare the spreadsheet in advance so that I can use drop-down lists for the particular individual and column I want, and the data I need, located at the intersection of that row and column, will "magically" appear at the top of the spreadsheet.

While this is not a beginner operation, it is something even a beginner can do; the directions are very specific and accurate. I had trouble grasping what it would do from reading the text, so I created an identical spreadsheet and followed the steps. It works like a dream. (See results, with my notes of what it does, at left.) If this is something you could use, give it a try. It could be a real timesaver.

Wow! I have put information in a Word table simply for the purpose of sorting. Or sometimes I have used Excel and then copied and pasted into Word. In Office 2007, at least, you don't even have to use a table to use the Table/Sort option. Check this blog post at TechRepublic for details. Cool!

This tip, "Use Word to type on a printed form without a typewriter," from Tech Republic offers a much better solution than the one I have used in the past. It does require a scanner.