Archive for August, 2011

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What is that smudge on the Office Ribbon?

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

In the previous post we looked at Office 2007 and the “Mystery Tabs“. Today let’s look at the Ribbon and it’s secret feature.

First, a quick overview of “The Ribbon” – In 2007 the menus are gone and replaced with a tabbed “ribbon”.

The Ribbon is set up in Groups and are organized in families. Things that never lived together before are now all on the same ribbon. For example, in Word and Excel there is a Page Layout Tab that holds nearly everything you would want when thinking about your document layout.

On the Insert Tab, the products all have a “Illustrations” group. This didn’t exist before. It is the home of  Clip Art, Pictures, Shapes (which is really the old Drawing Toolbar), and  “Smart Art” (which will need to be another post – just remember, it’s all about the bullets), which is a new way of creating diagrams. The idea is that  come of the useful, but buried features are being given a second chance to be used now that they can be easily found. In Excel many helpful features were extracted from the buried Auditing toolbar and moved out were they can be seen (and used).

In Office 2007 and 2010 click  each tab and look along the bottom of the big, thick bar (Ribbon) for labels. These are the Groups. In the picture in this post (click on the image for a larger view) you’ll see “Adjust, Picture Styles, Arrange, and Size“.  These are  the Groups for this Tab, and they have a secret.

Secret?

There are lots of ways to modify the clip art on the page. You can add frames, change colors, and so on..  Somewhere on that tab however is a button that will give you the hidden options. You won’t find it unless you have pretty good vision though.

The features are under the “Dialog Box Launcher Button” (gack, what a name). Not every group has them, but the Size Group on the Picture Tools/Format Tab does. Note:  if you don’t see that tab, click on the image. See that little grey smudge in the lower right corner of the group? It’s a grey box with a little arrow in it (and is really, really tiny). That’s the button you want. Fun, right?

So? What’s the problem?

Here’s my frustration with this button. Someone looking for hanging indents in Word (without using the ruler) can spend a long time digging around to get the 2003 dialog box to come out. It’s under the button on the Home Tab in the Font Group.

Once you find it you’re fine but it’s not exactly intuitive now is it?

 

Tags: Microsoft, Office
Posted in Microsoft, Software, Tutorials and Demos | No Comments »

Intro to ePub – part 2 of 3

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

ePub Tips, Tricks, and Links

In the first post of this series, I had you create a very simple file (with a template the Terry White was nice enough to provide) and preview it in Adobe’s Digital Editions software.

In this post I’m going to share a lot of links and some general Do’s and Don’ts for epub and digial book creation. In the third and final post we will be making a file from scratch.

What am I getting into?

If you are a regular InDesign user making content for eBooks can be a bit of a brain twister. In essence you are making webpages. Much of the control you had is gone, and some of the really fun features that can be seen in interactive files won’t work in book readers. To give you a sense of how new this might be, I’m putting some of the tips I gathered together below

General

• .epub is an XML based format designed to enable text reflow. All content will be linearized so plan for one long stream for text and images.

Layout

• Make each page one text box with inline graphics
• Make the cover ONE image
• Create separate document for cover page – have it be one image or imported ID file
• The book panel is a good way to make separate chapters that are seen in the conversion
• InDesign has an option for automatically making a TOC in an epub file. Create a TOC style and specify it on export. The Automatic ID TOC is turned into navigation men

Formatting

• You are creating Cascading Style Sheets when you convert (think like a web designer)
• Change Nested or Grep styles to regular styles
• Use Space Above, Below, and Indent to make space around images
• Soft Returns are turned into hard Returns
• Use Paragraph and Character Styleson the text (these will convert to CSS for the .epub file).
• You can’t totally control the fonts the user will see (the type of reader that is used will determine how fonts are seen)
• Convert Nested and Grep Styles to Paragraph and Character Styles
• Epub does support font embedding, but not all eBooks formats do and not all eBook readers that support the epub format will use embedded fonts
• Use OpenType Fonts

Exporting

• If you don’t want to make a new file you can apply XML tags to existing content and use the Structure pane to reorder it for export
• For long documents break document into chapters and use the book panel
• Create a Table Of Contents – this will become navigation in the e-reader
• For a true TOC you may need to make a manual page with hyperlinks or cross-ref’s
• Un-anchored content will float and end up at the beginning or end of your file
• Keep main graphics between 300 and 600 px wide
• The cover is often best at 800×600
• Images are converted to RGB
• Add Metadata

Graphics

• Epub supports several image formats, including JPEG, GIF, PNG
• Anchor Images to an empty paragraph  (then center align and use space before and after) or paste Inline
• Use color images
• InDesign coverts graphics to JPEG and GIF when exporting to epub unless you choose to copy the original images
• Convert InDesign art  by Cut/Paste into Il or PS and Placing in ID

Conversion

 

Altered

• CMYK will be converted to RGB on export
• Convert Tables to lists or images if you can

Preserved

• Hyperlinks to URL’s, files, email addresses, and text anchors
• Cross Ref’s are converted to hyperlinks on export (Note: Some eBook readers don’t support any hyperlinks)
• Footnotes are kept, but are converted to endnotes

Discarded

• Multiple Carriage returns
• Empty Frames
• Frame attributes such as Fill and Stroke
• Custom settings for Anchored Objects
• Text wrap setting. Use Space before and After instead
• Hyperlinks that reference specific pages
• Master Page Items
• Automatic Page Numbers
• Page Breaks
• TOC generated by the InDesign TOC feature (do this anyway – it becomes navigation )
• Artwork made with InDesign vector tool (those you should copy into Illustrator and place back into InDesign)
• Not all text formatting is preserved

Links

• Digital Editions Reader
• Open-source EpubCheck program hosted by Google at code.google.com/p/epubcheck
• Free, standalone, cross-platform Javaâ„¢ app, ePubChecker
• More information on epub format -  http://idpf.org/
• Free open-source eBook conversion tool www.calibre-ebook.com
• InDesign to Kindle – Adobe
• Terry White  – http://terrywhite.com/techblog/
• Colleen Cunningham has a massive and massivly helpful list of resources here - http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/indesign-to-ebook-resources/

Ok, got it – now what?

Take an existing Indesign file (a reasonalbly fancy one) and export it to epub. Look at how the content is moved (and what doen’t convert). Next time we will finish will a soup-to-nuts tutorial – see you then!

Tags: Adobe, ePub, epublishing, InDesign, software training
Posted in Adobe, Software, Tips for Trainers, Training, Tutorials and Demos | No Comments »

Scooby-Doo and the Office 2007 Mystery Tabs

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

In the previous post, we looked at “The Office Button” briefly. Let’s take a quick look at another feature…

Scooby-doo mystery tabs

One of the biggest changes from a behavioral perspective in 2007′s Office Suite is the new “Contextual Tabs” – what I call Scooby-Doo Mystery Tabs. In short, you can’t see certain content from the main tabs.

If you want the see the details on manipulating a picture you must be touching the picture to get the options for it. If you click off the picture, the tab disappears.

In the screen capture you’ll see “Header and Footer Tools” in green. This is the tab you get when you insert a header or footer. When you click back into the document, the tab goes away. When you want the tab back you need to click into the header or footer.

It’s not a huge problem but it does take some getting used for for a lot of my students.

Just remember: Touch the content you want to change.

Tags: Microsoft, Office
Posted in Microsoft, Software, Tips for Trainers, Training | 1 Comment »