If you’re trying to really reach out there and connect to others in ways to develop your business career, I highly recommend using LinkedIn. Whether you are trying to get the word out when you’re looking for a new position, or you are trying to develop your business contacts, LinkedIn lets you connect to a lot of other people. While places like Facebook are fun for extending social contacts, LinkedIn is a social media tool that you shouldn’t pass up.

After signing up, you can start checking where other professionals in your company are connected and issue an invitation to them to connect with you. You can also check to see if contacts outside your company also have contacts that you would like to meet. This helps you connect to them (kind of like the ‘Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon’ idea). Write recommendations for the people that you are connected to that you admire. This can help them with their career. People may also write recommendationa for you, too. That won’t do your career any harm either.

LinkedIn also has other career tools like letting you develop professional groups. Check it out! Over 50 million professionals already have.

The Microsoft Office Standard Toolbar has buttons for New file and Open file but it doesn’t include a Close file button, which would be very handy to use when you want to close a document, worksheet or presentation, but you don’t want to exit the program.

First of all, open MS PowerPoint 2003. Point at the blank area NEXT to the Standard or Formatting toolbar and tap your right mouse button to pull up a toolbar menu. Select Customize at the bottom of the menu.

Select the Commands tab. With File selected as a Category on the left side, look under the Commands on the right side. Select the Close command with your right mouse button and drag it up to the Standard Toolbar. Drop it to the right of the Open button (as you drag the button, you’ll see a little plus sign and when you move the mouse cursor to the proper place, you’ll see an I bar showing up in the toolbar). When you let go, the Close button icon will appear. Note: If you put it in the wrong place, just drag it where you want it to go. Now click on the Close button on the Customize dialog box. Now you can easily close PowerPoint presentations. You can exit the program.

Now open up MS Word 2003. Repeat the same steps, then exit the program.

Now open up MS Excel 2003. Follow the same steps as before. Notice that when you have the Customize dialog box open in Excel, there is only a word that says Close instead of a Close button. Drag it up next to the Open button on the Standard Toolbar, anyway. After the word Close appears on the toolbar, point at it and select Default Style. The Close button image will appear. Close the dialog box. You can exit the program.

Now, whenever you have saved your work (if you haven’t saved your work, it will prompt you to do so), you can close your files in MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint with one click.

By the way, you can also use these steps to add other button functions that are useful to you, too.

This tip is short, but sweet. You already know that scrolling your mouse wheel up and down will move your document, worksheet, or presentation up and down.

If you hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard while you do it, you will change the magnification of your screen. Hold down the Ctrl key and scroll up to enlarge your screen and scroll down to reduce its size.

Windows Vista

Windows Task Manager has Performance and Networking dynamic graphs, that show you your computer’s CPU and network activity. They also show your CPU history and the amount of network traffic. (You can see this in Windows XP, too.)

You can get to these graphs by pointing your mouse cursor at a blank area of your taskbar at the bottom of your screen. You will see a menu appear. Click your right mouse button and select Task Manager. Then click on the Performance tab. You will see the performance graphs appear. As you watch, you’ll see your computer’s activity being charted.

The main use of these is to help you troubleshoot problems for your computer

To return the graph to normal size, double-click it again.

Clicking on the Resource Monitor button will give you even more information. Click on the CPU, Disk, Network, and Memory bars to expand them to see what is affecting any of these areas. You can also click on any of the help areas at the bottom to get help to create reports on your computer’s performance.

Would you like to have a tool that will let you Associate information and Collaborate on Ideas? Would you also like it to be easy to use and FREE? You don’t have to download it, either. Just go to the website and login whenever you want to create them.

There’s a great brainstorming tool that you can use at www.bubbl.us and all you have to do to get it is register. Once you register, you’ll have access to the bubbles. They’re a lot like organizational charts, only

much more flexible.

You start with a single bubble. Click in the middle and type a label for it. After typing the label, if you tap your Enter key on the keyboard, you’ll get a sub-level bubble, known as a child. Type a label for that bubble. If you want another at the same level, known as sibling, tap your Tab key instead of your Enter key. You can move all of your bubbles around by grabbing them at the top of a bubble and dragging, or just one bubble by dragging it from its top left corner. Delete them by clicking on their top right corner (they explode nicely), make another sub-level bubble (child) by dragging down from the bottom middle, and change the colors of your bubbles when you tap their lower left corners. You can also set up connections between all kinds of bubbles by dragging from the bottom right corner (free connect) of a bubble to another bubble. Don’t worry that you won’t remember where these areas in your bubble are, because when you point at a bubble, these different areas light up.

If you want to split your text to another line, hold down the Shift key as you tap your Enter key.

Play around with your bubbles. Break connections by double-clicking on lines. Zoom in and zoom out with the scroll wheel of your mouse.

Want to collaborate? You can invite others to work on your bubbles with you. Click on the Friends tab at the top of the page. If your Friend has an account with Bubbl.us, you can use the Find tool to find them after you’ve typed in their name. If they don’t, you can send them an invitation by email (click on their link to invite them).

After you have finished creating your project, you can save it. They save as Bubble Sheets. You can come back to use them any time. (Just remember to login).

Play with them. Have fun. I even use mine to create To Do lists. You’ll find yourself using these to organize all kinds of things. Practical, fun, easy and free. This is a great tool to add to your collection.

Hallmark’s website offers many wonderful cards and many of them are FREE. This presentation shows you how to sign up for a free account, add contacts to an address book so you don’t have to remember the email addresses of your family and friends, and how to get and personalize a free e-card and send it.

Open it in a separate window and click on the arrows (right and left) at the bottom left of the presentation to navigate through it.

Link to Presentation on Using Hallmark’s Free E-Cards

Audacity is a free audio program that lets you create, edit and convert audio (vocal and instrumental) files. It can be used to create podcasts, multi-track instrumental songs, record lectures, tell stories, archive family histories, capture audio from videos and games, do karaoke, podcast, record step by step instructions, create audio to do lists, sing lullabies, slow down music tracks to hear exact notes, take lecture notes, practice your singing, clean up digital audio files from records, add sound effects to music and many other uses.

To top it all off, it isn’t hard to use, either. Here is an embedded video I created on how to install Audacity on your computer. Have fun with it!

If this video doesn’t work properly, please click on this link to see it displayed on TeacherTube.
Installing Audacity on your Computer

I was asked to do a software tip lesson for Photoshop Elements, so here it is. It’s an intermediate level lesson, assuming that you already know how to do a little basic editing. First, you take open up Photoshop Elements and open the file of a photo that has distracting background elements in it.Then duplicate your photo. A quick way of doing this in some Photoshop Element versions is to use a Ctrl – J key combination. Or you can drag the thumbnail of your layer on top of the first icon underneath the Layer Palette. (Duplicating the original layer is a step you should always take. It lets you have an original to compare against your finished results, it serves as a backup in case you really mess up the editing of your photo, and the original photo layer is locked, preventing you from applying many editing changes to your photo.) Get a good view of your subject by selecting View, Fit on screen. Now you can select your subject by completely painting it with your Selection Brush tool (you can select it by typing the letter a) or by encircling your subject with the Lasso tool (you can select the lasso tool by typing the letter l). After you have finished selecting your subject, put them on another layer by selecting Layer, New, Layer via Copy or use the Ctrl – J key combination.Find a photo with a nice background and open it with the File, Open command. (The resolution of the photo should be similar, or part of your combined photo might look grainy.) If that happens, choose a different photo that has a closer resolution. If your photo is maximized, you will need to cascade it because you will be dragging the subject from one photo to the other. (You can tell that it is maximized if you can’t see the edges of your photo). In the picture to the left, the Cascade Windows button is highlighted in yellow. You will find it in the top right corner of your window. Now hold down your Ctrl key and tap the thumbnail of your subject (on its own layer). That will select your subject. Click on the move button or type m to select the Move button arrow. Put your cursor on the thumbnail of your subject and drag it on top of the photo that has a nice background. (This wouldn’t work if your photo was maximized). Drag it to where you want it. If it is too large, drag it downwards until you can see the top left corner of your subject’s bounding box. Put your cursor on it and when the double-headed arrow appears, drag down and right until your subject is the right size. Repeat if necessary. Press Enter or click on the check mark on the Options Toolbar to finalize your changes. If you need to adjust the lighting on your subject so that it matches the background better, select your subject by holding down your Ctrl key and tapping the thumbnail of your subject (on its layer). Then select Enhance, Adjust Lighting, and using Brightness and Contrast or Shadows / Highlights or Levels until the lighting looks correct.Your photo should now be ready to print. You can also save it as a JPG (File, Save As, select JPG as the file type).

These steps can also be used any time you want to combine element(s) from one photo with another photo.

The Format Painter button is a handy little tool that can quickly copy formats for text and shapes, to other text or objects. It’s located on the Standard Toolbar in MS Office 2003 and earlier editions. In MS Office 2007, it’s on the left side of the ribbon, in the Clipboard area.

In Excel, click on the cell where the text is formatted the way you want it. Click on the Format Painter button. (Your cursor turns into a plus sign with a paintbrush next to it). Then click on the cell that has the text that you want to change. It should instantly change to match the formatting that was in the first cell. If you want to change the text in multiple cells, see the Quick Tip down below.

In MS Word, have you ever had a section of text suddenly look different from the rest? The cause might be that the section of text has been switched back to the default settings that are MS Word’s default settings, or it could be a computer glitch. You might also want to change text that you’ve pasted in your document from somewhere else. To fix this, select some text that has the proper formatting, by dragging your cursor over it. (Don’t worry about selecting entire words or phrases – ANY text will do). Click on the Format Painter button. (Your cursor turns into an I bar with a paintbrush next to it.) Then drag over the text that you want formatted the same way (note – if you drag over additional text that already has the correct formatting on it, that text will not change, so don’t worry about being precise).

This works in PowerPoint the same way, too.

Quick Tip: If you double-click on the Format Painter button, it will keep the selected formatting on, so you can change multiple selections of text or objects. Just click once again on it when you are finished, to turn it off.