Another Office Tip: Format painter (Office)

The Format Painter tool replicates the formatting from one part of a document to another. So instead of manually redoing all the formatting yourself, you can use the Format Painter.

1. select the text whose formatting you want to replicate.

2. click the Format Painter toolbar button.
3. select the text you want to imbue with the format.

For bonus points,
1. select the text whose formatting you want to replicate

2. double-click the Format Painter toolbar button.
3. select the multiple texts you want to imbue with the format

Source: http://office.Microsoft.com

Another Office Tip: World Clocks in Windows Vista

Within the section of “Another Office Tip” I will give some tips, ideas how to get the maximum out of your Windows products and help you to make working easier.

When working in an international environment, time zones are important as you don’t want to wake up you business partner to early :)

There are many world clock tools available on the net, but always you need to install these programs, it takes more place on your desktop etc.

This is a tip for Vista users, Windows Vista has a feature to show 2 extra clocks in the taskbar;  You will always see the current local time and by clicking on the time you will get the others clocks in a visual way.



By position your mouse on the time, without clicking, you will get a simple list

How to setup different clocks in Vista?

- Go to Control Panel
- Select Date & Time
- Select the tab: Additional Clocks
- Choose the clocks you like to add and give it a name.

Naming Conventions

The raison to write this article is because I still see many multi-nationals struggling with naming conventions within their IT department.

Naming conventions are as old as IT itself, but still many companies do not have proper naming conventions, and even worse, they use internal of external sources to create one.

What is the reason to have Naming Conventions in the first place?
The main reason to introduce naming conventions is to :

• - to reduce the effort needed to read  and understand source code
• - to enhance source code appearance

The most important reason is the first one, to reduce the effort needed to read and understand source code

Code must be easy and quick readable and understandable when new employees (internal of external) enters the IT department or when other teams takes over the project..

The answer I gave to my customers is very easy: take the naming conventions found on the Internet.  The goal is not only to have company related Naming conventions, but general naming conventions.

New employees or external consultancy will loose less time understanding the general naming conventions, as they were used too with their previous work, instead of learning the company related ones, which will never be followed 100%.

Some links:

BizTalk: http://wes.fehler.ca/weblog/biztalk/2005/01/biztalk-naming-conventions.html

General Naming Conventions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229002.aspx

And many more are available on the net. 

 

Don’t let your IT department loose time to write company related naming conventions, re-use them!