(RSS/email readers, click here to see the design!)

Note: The ‘we’ I’m referring to is my team at SET Consulting.  A big thank you to Keith for the design and David for the development.  While we were inspired by many other blog designs, this theme was created from scratch (i.e., all modifications to the well-structured default WordPress theme).

New Purpose

The first change has nothing to do with the design.  I’ve simplified the purpose of the site to “You want to be happy and productive. With a slant toward technology, I try to help with that here.”  I’ll still occasionally cover DC technology and often discuss social media…but the core focus has been refined.

Organization Of Information

The main purpose of the redesign was to organize our information in a more relevant manner.  We hope you’ll check out the “best of TECHNOTHEORY” and other sidebar elements.  I want to keep you aware of what I’m up to without overwhelming you with too much stuff—we hope this improves your experience.

Consistency Between Websites

Now all three of our websites use a similar color palette, and are tied together with the tabbed bar at the very top of this page.  While there are improvements ahead for all sites, we think this will help you to find a consistent (and maybe someday recognizable) brand.

Quick Thank You’s

While there were many sites we looked to for examples there are a few I want to mention:

• I love WordPress.  It’s amazing what open-source software can do
• Keith suggested making the first paragraph slightly more prominent based on a site he frequents, farfromfearless.  Here’s an example there
• A big fan of Chris Brogan, that’s where I got the idea for the shaded face picture

Surprise: We Designed This In PowerPoint And Word

What you most likely wouldn’t guess is that this entire site was designed in PowerPoint and Word.  We used PowerPoint for all the layout and graphics, especially in the sidebar.  We used Word for the typography in each blog post.  No, we didn’t export any code from Office—that was all done by hand in HTML, CSS, PHP, or SQL.

So you probably think we’re crazy?  Well, we consider ourselves to be some of the best PowerPoint, Word, and Excel designers and developers.  So we wanted to practice what we preach.  After all, our Microsoft Office design business has been on fire lately, with projects for Fannie Mae, NTT America, NIST, and other recognizable brands.

Do you want to know more about this?  Let me know in the comments and maybe I’ll dedicate a post to the topic of Office design…

Any Thoughts, Compatibility Issues, or Suggestions?

We’re very proud of this site but have some changes in store.  If we weren’t so busy with other work we’d fix up the display of posts within categories and I’d add much more to the Lijit search functionality.  But that’s not all that’s on the wish list.

Is there anything you’d like to see?  Are you having any display issues?

Not so in Word 2007. Now it uses this mundane and “helpful” set of Word instructions–boo. You’d think they’d just go with lorem ipsum if they wanted to use different sentences. Anyhow, the new result repeats the following paragraph over and over:

On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers, footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks. When you create pictures, charts, or diagrams, they also coordinate with your current document look. You can easily change the formatting of selected text in the document text by choosing a look for the selected text from the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab. You can also format text directly by using the other controls on the Home tab. Most controls offer a choice of using the look from the current theme or using a format that you specify directly. To change the overall look of your document, choose new Theme elements on the Page Layout tab. To change the looks available in the Quick Style gallery, use the Change Current Quick Style Set command. Both the Themes gallery and the Quick Styles gallery provide reset commands so that you can always restore the look of your document to the original contained in your current template.

I understand that this offers better demo text than repeating a single sentence, but I wish it could’ve been a little more creative. This is just begging me to write a new random generator that takes lines from Stairway to Heaven or The 9/11 Report or something like that…

Here’s how it looks:

This is a huge change. People aren’t used to having the cursor skip a line when they press Enter. (Even though After Spacing is more precise and better maintains consistency). I wonder how long it’ll take people to find this command:

On the one hand, they’ll find it and fix their problem…but then if they use it I think people are going to have trouble deciding when to use the Before command when to use the After command. I’m just afraid consistency is going to be difficult for people to achieve at first–when things are unfamiliar and the old way no longer ways.

Well, Microsoft, you’re certainly going to give me work as a trainer…

Today I just realized that you can right-click on a task reminder and choose to mark it complete without opening the item. It’s really that easy:

1. Right click on a task in your “Reminders” window
2. Select Mark Complete

Enjoy!

For thirty seconds I considered the possibility that Word was not in err and that I had in fact exceeded its capacity for vocabulary.

In actuality, it’s possible to run out of space using Word’s custom dictionary, which is capped at 64kb (around 10,000 words). However, the more likely scenario was that my spelling/grammar tool was corrupt. Sure enough, after following the steps outlined in this informative help-desk article, all was once again copacetic…

Tip 1. Don’t perform a “Replace All.”

Inevitably there’s going to be something that doesn’t fit a pattern. You have two choices, you can refine your search (see below) to a more specific term (which is a good idea, but can be time consuming) or you can take the extra 20 seconds to review each item before replacing it. And, for the record, you don’t need to keep pressing Find and then Replace. By merely pressing Replace (or better yet, pressing R on the keyboard!), Word will move you between each selection and then replace it. A quick glance before each replacement will ensure much more accurate search & replaces.

Tip 2. Refine your searches

I love the More button. If you haven’t clicked on this before, shame on you. I highly encourage to consider how you can refine your searches to make them work better for you. For instance, let’s say you wanted to search for the word “soft” but didn’t want to find instances of the s-o-f-t in “software” or “Microsoft.” This would be a good reason to check Find whole words only. Simiarly, I’m working with a product that has “Hosted” in its title. When the product was renamed, a search for “hosted” would return a lot of incorrect results, but Hosted (with Match Case checked) would be much more likely to produce many more valid results.

Tip 3. Now let’s dig a little deeper

Two of my favorite things to search for are ^p and ^l, which are Word’s special codes for paragraph break (hard return) and line break (soft/shift return). I often need to clean up hard returns in an email’s text that I’ve copied and pasted into a document. Other times I’ve writen something in Word but I want a clean way to add html tags. In the case of the latter, I might search for “^p^p” and replace it with “</p>^p^p<p>”. This will perform a search for two successive presses of the <ENTER> key and replace them with the appropriate HTML tags. The additional character codes are available in the Special drop down menu pictured above. Some other neat codes are ^t for tab and ^+ for emdash…

Sometimes I’ll want to search for text that’s formatted one way and alter it to another set of formatting. Granted, I use styles so this is less of an issue, but when working on others’ documents I frequently find centered headings that need to be left aligned, made larger, and become bold. By using the Format drop down I can search for centered text:

1. Place your cursor in the Find what textbox.
2. Click on the Format button and select Paragraph
   
3. In the Alignment dropdown, choose Centered
4. Click OK
5. Note how Centered is now listed under the Find what textbox:

Then I can replace all centered text with Left-Aligned, Bold, 16pt text:

1. Place your cursor in the Replace with textbox.
2. Click on the Format button and select Paragraph
   
3. In the Alignment dropdown, choose Left
   
4. Click on the Format button and select Font
   
5. In the Alignment dropdown, choose Left
   
6. In the Font Style selector, choose Bold
7. In the Size selector, choose 16
8. Click OK
9. Note how the Replace with formatting has now changed:

This is a fast way to change all the formatting in a long document that was created without styles.

Tip 4. Just be careful

When you use all these formatting commands, just be careful to clear out your textboxes and formatting. Before performing a new search, it’s a good idea to click in each of the textboxes and make sure there are no spaces. Then be sure to click No Formatting in each of the text boxes. You may also need to turn off Match Case or Find whole words only.

Hopefully this’ll make your editing lives just a little easier…