I Heart Tech

Love me for my Mind, not my Face

No, I don't have a MyFace page (that's what I call My Space and FaceBook). I simply haven't gotten into them. While I do have logins for both I don't use them for connecting with friends or colleagues (I use my phone and email for that). I use MySpace to discover new music (usually two hours of my life that I won't get back). And the other day I FINALLY created a FaceBook login to appease a great friend of mine that is totally tech deficient. Within TWO (count them TWO) minutes she had befriended me and "tagged" several pictures of me at her enragement party. While none of them were unpublishable or embarrassing by any means, I had a drink in every one and was wearing a mini-dress FAR too short for a legal technology trainer to be seen in. I don't like the idea of comingling my personal world with my professional one. Should I have two Faces!?? omg YEARS of my life will be lost.  I logged back in a few times and drew the RSS feed into my reader but I haven't kept up with it. And Twitter? Well, I tried that too, for a minute. I created an account and that's all I did. Before I had the time to figure out how to use it, I already had 3 "followers". Creepy. Who were these people? (No one I knew - one was even in Germany) And why were they stalking me? Just kidding, Tom! I can just see Tom Mighell now, rolling his eyes at my disinterest in all these new-fangled social and communication tools. Maybe someday when I'm really bored and seriously have nothing better to do, I'll get back into them all and figure it out.

For now, I have found a professional and focused social networking community that I can TOTALLY get behind and hope you join me there. The ABA has created LegallyMinded, another space geared toward legal (you don't have to be an ABA member btw). I'm just figuring it out and I know they are too but that's where you can find me and if you're lucky, I'll even let you be my friend.

Microsoft Word - AutoNumber a Column in a Table

I was helping a paralegal yesterday who had heard a rumor that tables could be pretty useful in Word. I was happy to confirm such a rumor and went on to help her with her first project - a simple pleading index which she would normally do with tabs (what a nightmare). We started by inserting a table (Insert > Table, Select initial number of rows and columns) and named the header columns. Then, she started to manually type in the "Tab Number" number. I had to grab the back of her chair for support to keep from falling over in horror. omg. Imagine all that manual labor! What if she had hundreds of rows and had to insert one in the middle - or worse - at the top?! Holy moly waste of time and money! I composed myself before she noticed and gently told her that there is a better way:

• Hover your mouse over the column that you want to number, you'll notice it change to a downward-pointing arrow.
• When it does, Click. That selects an entire column at a time. You'll see that the column has been highlighted.
• While it's highlighted, find and click the Numbering button in Word's Formatting Toolbar.
• Wah-la! Now as you delete and insert rows, your numbers will automatically adjust.
• To remove a number from an unwanted cell (like the first/heading cell). Click in that cell alone and then click the Numbering button once to toggle it off in that cell.
• If you want to use letters or romans or some other character in there, you can select the column again and go to Format > Bullets and Numbering and change to another list type.

(The video was made it Word 2007, but it's the same steps in 2003)

Send To: Nowhere - Because Send To > Mail Recipient is Missing

When I right-clicked on a file today to send it via email I noticed that my option to Send To a "Mail Recipient" was gone. All the other useless options to Send To where still there. I don't know how this happens, really... one day it's there, next day it's gone - much like my 401K. The good news is, that unlike my retirement cabana in Tahiti, this I can get back. Here's how:

1. In Windows XP go to Start > Run
   In Vista, click the Start bubble and just type right into the input box above the bubble (where it says "Start Search" in light gray.)
2. Type shell:sendto and press ENTER. (This opens the SendTo folder of your user profile.)
3. Right-click in a blank area of the window and go to New > Text document
4. Name the text file Mail Recipient.MAPIMail (be sure to remove the .txt extension) and press ENTER to apply the name.
5.  If your icon looks like an email envelope, you should be all set to SEND TO again.