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Need to update your O365 email signature? (maybe you still have a line about a new email address that isn't so new anymore...?) Need to create a signature?
You'll find help with signatures in the Microsoft documentation about signatures.
No, that's not a typo - honest! A friend from Columbia, Missouri (where I lived and went to Library School) sent me an article recently about a Soofa in front of their city hall. It was very intriguing and I had to share it with you.
Soofa is a solar-powered charging bench. The company was started out of MIT in 2014 and is based in Boston. Their mission "is to update the urban context for the mobile generation." When I read the article, my first thought was how libraries could use something like this in their outdoor spaces. Many libraries have gardens, wi-fi gardens, or patrons using their parking lots to access wi-fi. How cool would it be to not only offer wi-fi but a place to charge their device at the same time?
Soofa was unveiled at last year's White House Maker Faire (see this article for a picture of President Obama using one) and since then has been installed in cities across the nation. According to this Boston Globe article, 11 benches were installed in Cambridge, Massachusetts and 100 more have been sent around the country. I'll be watching for one to show up in Wisconsin and at a public library.
At Tech Day in April, our presenter talked about helping patrons with technology. She brought up the idea that you don't need to know the answer to every technology question a patron might have--- you just need to treat the technology question like any other reference question, help the patron find the answer, and learn together. What an awesome way to approach technology questions!
Just recently, I saw this article about Colorado State Library's expanded Library Creation & Learning Centers website, a free online resource where libraries can access interactive technology and customer service training modules for staff, makerspace programming ideas, curated links to digital creation software, and more.
One of the things I ran across while browsing the site is this helpful (and super-cute) slideshow on using a Technology Reference Interview (~3-5 min). If you have a few minutes, give it a look!
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I want to let you in on a secret. Tech people don't know everything about computers either. We know lots of stuff, of course, but not EVERYTHING -- and we look stuff up all the time!
Confession: I had to look up how to close apps on a Windows 8 tablet---couldn't figure it out for the life of me! After a quick internet search and 15 seconds of reading, I am now an expert at the old swipe-down-to-close move.
On a recent trip to a library I overheard one librarian ask another if there is a way to tell how to connect a USB cable to the PC correctly the first time. I thought I was the only one who had that problem. Even when I’m certain I have the cable the right way it doesn’t go in to the port I think I must have the cable at the wrong angle or I missed the port, either way I have to flip the cable around to make it fit.
This got me thinking that there must be some way to tell how the USB cable is supposed to fit into the port. A quick internet search lead me to an article on Lifehacker which revealed that the USB symbol on the cable is “up” and that the USB port on a PC should have the same symbol which represents “up”. Easy peasy right, not so fast, what about PCs where the USB symbol is on the side of the port. Well, in this case figure out what side of the PC is “up” and that should work.
I found that this isn’t going to work 100% of the time. We found a cable in our office that had a brand logo on the top and the USB symbol on the bottom of a cable. In this case look at the two square holes at the tip of the cable. One side the two holes will be filled in and the other side they will be open. The side where the two holes are open is up.
I know this isn’t a huge problem and I didn’t just blow your mind (maybe Tim’s) because it probably takes less time to switch the cable around vs looking at the cable and port studying the symbols. So maybe if you didn’t already know this, this can be that one thing you’re supposed to learn today.
This guest post is from Abby Ward, a UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies student who completed a practicum with SCLS.
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The other day I needed to find a way to merge two PDF files together. I don't have Adobe Acrobat on my PC so I thought I would look to see if there was anything on the Internet that was free and easy to use. After some searching I found a website called smallpdf.com. I was amazed at what you could do with PDFs on their website and it was all free. They have the normal conversions that zamzar.com offers which are JPG to PDF, PDF to Word, PDF to Excel (though I don't know why you would want to do this), PDF to PPT (convert a PDF into Powerpoint sounds really useful), and then the reverse of these. Then there were some options that I thought were really cool. They are Compress PDF, Merge PDF (yes!, exactly what I was looking for), Split PDF and Unlock PDF (this unlocks password-protected files; not sure of the legality of this). I tried the Merge PDFs option and it was very simple. The merged file I got back looked great and I was very happy with it. I would highly recommend this website if you ever need to manipulate PDF file(s).
Awhile back I shared a trick for quickly turning boring report numbers into colorized heat maps. Accenting data is something I find myself doing frequently in Excel. Although it offers many options for doing that (fonts, borders, fills, etc.), color is my preferred highlighting method.
Sometimes the default colors aren't enough or aren't appropriate for the task. Particularly when designing reports for printing, I prefer a broader range of lighter pastels; many of the default colors are just too strong.
Of course, Excel will let you assign custom colors to just about any element, and you can pick from over 16 million colors. The catch is that you'll have to fuss with the custom color selector, perhaps repeatedly, which can be time consuming.
Of course there's an easier way. Select the Page Layout tab from the Office Ribbon. Near the left end of the controls, pull down the Colors menu, and choose from a number of prefabricated alternate palettes. Any of these options will replace Office's default colors with a new set.
For my purposes (more pastels, for better printing), I find the color sets named Adjacency, Black Tie or Foundry are particularly handy. You can also achieve a new color set by choosing an entirely different Theme, but doing that will also change all your fonts and other display characteristics.
