Tips and Shortcuts for Web Based E-mail

Google's Gmail web interface has a lot of hidden features and shortcut keys that you can use.  To view a list of these, please download this .pdf document.  One really handy one is hitting tab, then space bar or enter to send a message.

http://2136722317829374289-a-googleapps-com-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/googleapps.com/deploy-google-apps/Home/resources-user-adoption/quick-reference/Google_Mail_Shortcuts.pdf

Printing from the new e-mail system

When you're viewing an e-mail in the new e-mail system, you can print it by clicking the little "print" icon which looks like a printer, which is in the upper right corner of the e-mail you're viewing.  

If the message is part of a thread of messages, and you only want to print one of them, you can click the small down arrow next to the header info to the right of the the sender/recipient info, and choose "Print".  

If you scroll to the top of the thread of messages, the small print icon pictured above will be at the top of the entire thread.  Clicking it will print all of the messages in the thread of messages.

Printing Your Progress Reports (For Grades K-5)

Elementary teachers who are interested in printing their own progress reports using the Edusoft dev software, and one of the copy machines, can do so using this printable instruction sheet created by Justin Gilson with help from Sean Elkinton. 

Make sure you test print just one before you run a class set!

http://www.washougal.k12.wa.us/blog/print-k5-progress-report.pdf

Toolbar items missing in Excel 2011

If you're used to the tool bars in Office 2008 for Mac, you're used to having a specific set of buttons on each row of your tool bars, with certain items like "format borders" always being visible.

In the newer versions of Excel and Word 2011 for Mac, the applications will start hiding items from your "ribbon" if the Excel/Word window is not full screen.  For instance, when you shrink an Excel Spreadsheet, you'll end up with a sub-set of the tools available, and there's not a way to get them back without making the window larger (or digging in the menu to find them)

In the screen shot below, the Excel window is set to be almost the entire width of the screen, and you get the full set of items in the ribbon (note the format borders icon is showing).

In the screen shot below, the Excel window is set to be about 1/2 the width of the screen, and the format borders icon, which was between the underline U and the fill background paint bucket, along with many others, have been dropped off the ribbon!

One solution is to drag the window using the right lower corner to make the ribbon show more items.

If you want, you can customize the ribbon by opening "Excel" menu, then going to Preferences.  Click the ribbon item, and uncheck some of the items that you don't use.  This will allow more items that you DO use to show up when the window is more narrow, hopefully keeping the items that are "must haves" for you!

Microsoft Office for Mac Applications not showing data

If you have Microsoft Word or Excel 2011, and opening spreadsheets or Word documents does not show any content, it could be a font conflict keeping it from showing the data.

You can use the "Font Book" Application to fix this.

Quit any open Microsoft Applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
Open the Applications folder on your hard drive
Open Font Book
Click File, then "Restore Standard Fonts"
It may say it didn't find any, but this will fix the issue.

Quit Font book, and re-open the document, and see if it's fixed.

Embedding a Calendar in Google sites - required step is sharing calendar first

If you're going to embed a calendar in your Google Site, you have to make it public.  You can do this by following these directions:

Click "Calendar" in the black bar at the top after you've signed into Google Sites or your e-mail

Find the calendar you're wanting to embed (or that you've already embedded), and hover your mouse to the right of the calendar's name.  A small triangle will show up, click it once to access a drop down menu

On the drop down menu, click "Calendar Settings"

On the page that shows up, click Share this calendar, near the top under the name of the calendar

On the sharing tab, check the box for "Share this Calendar with others"

Also check the box for "Make this calendar public" and choose "see event details" from the drop down menu to the right

Click Save to save this change.

For a step-by-step guide to embedding the calendar, click here:

http://support.google.com/sites/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=157219

Stop Mac 10.7 from re-opening all the windows in an application after you re-open it

For those who are annoyed by the helpful feature of the new Macs running 10.7


The new Mac computer has a "feature" that's meant to be handy.  When you quit a program (Command + Q) or File/Quit, it is going to re-open any files that are currently open the next time you open that same application.

This can be handy for starting up in the morning when you want to carry on where you left off, but if that's not what you want, it can be annoying!

To prevent this, there's a couple things you can do

Instead of hitting command + q  you can do command + option + q to have it not re-open those windows

OR

You can do Command + w to close each of the open windows, and then Command + q

OR

you can choose to disable this system wide:
Go into System Preferences, then General, and uncheck the "Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps." option.