When presenting, I sometimes want to show something on my screen that is small. In Chrome, I can zoom in with CTRL + [plus sign], zoom out with CTRL + [minus sign], and return to normal with CTRL + [zero]. If it’s text I’m showing in Word, I can zoom in using the zoom slider in the bottom right corner. If I want to show, say, the Word toolbar ribbon, I have to use something else to magnify it. This is also for anyone who has said something like, “I know you can’t read what’s on this PowerPoint slide, but…”

Windows Magnifier is likely already installed on your computer – also good to know if you have to use someone else’s computer or your classroom computer. Search for Magnifier.

Click the plus sign to magnify. In “Views,” switch to “Preview full screen” to see your whole screen and drag the zoom area to where you’d like to zoom. Or use the “Lens view” like a magnifying glass. Drag your mouse and the “lens” will follow. To use the touch screen with the lens view, tap your screen to see shaded handles appear on the edges of the “lens.” Tap and drag those handles. If you change the lens size, however, those handles disappear; you’ll only be able to move the lens with your mouse or trackpad.

The next time you run magnifier, it will default to the last settings you used. That means that if you like the lens view and only use the lens view, the Magnifier will always start with the lens view.

Once you’re zoomed in, it’s difficult to use the Magnifier toolbar. Decide which features you prefer to use, and memorize those keyboard shortcuts – don’t try to memorize them all; that’s not necessary. Or if you know you’re going to need this with your next tiny font PowerPoint presentation, type the keyboard shortcuts into the notes field for that tiny-font slide.

There are other magnifier programs out there. If you have one that you really like, please let me know!

The fall 2017 Windows 10 update brings with it an emoji menu, and it’s only accessible via a keyboard shortcut. Windows key (WIN) + semicolon or WIN + period will call it up. Click on the emoji you want to select it.

Click on the magnifying glass to search. Click on the other menu icons to browse by category. The clock icon will initially show seemingly randomly selected emoji – and they very well may be. Once you start using them, this menu will show your most recently used emoji.

On the people tab, there is a little box in the upper right corner.

Click it to change the skin tone of the people emoji.

Emoji can be used anywhere you can type. Episode 272: Person in Lotus Position of the 99% Invisible podcast will tell you all you need to know about what makes emoji work across platforms (but why it may look a little different on your phone than it does on a friend’s phone) and how new emoji come to be.

I confess. I’ve been sprinkling emoji into my online grading. Who doesn’t like getting a gold star?

How did I learn about this emoji menu? I have a keyboard shortcut of WIN + apostrophe. One time I missed, and hit WIN + semicolon. “Okay. Cool. Wait! What does the WIN + apostrophe shortcut do for you?” That’s what brings up Ditto, the clipboard manager I use.

Trivia: The word emoji, according to Merriam-Webster, is “borrowed from Japanese, literally, ‘pictograph,’ from e ‘picture, drawing’ + moji ‘letter, character’.”

Happy emoji-ing!

We have been talking a lot at my college about accessibility. Are our videos captioned? Do our webpages and document images have alt-text that can be read by screen readers?

In that vein, I have been thinking about OCR – optical character recognition. Here is an image. It’s just a quick screenshot of text from a previous blog post. I added some alt-text to the image. A screen reader would come to this image and read the alt-text. For the curious, the alt-text is “Image of text from a previous blog post,” and you may even be able to read that text by mousing over the image.

But, really, if the text in the image is important, I should use the text itself, not an image of the text. Or maybe there is some text I have in an image that I want to be able to edit. If it’s just a few sentences, it’s not a big deal to just type it out. But if it’s a lot of text? That option is less attractive.

OneNote is my go-to notetaking tool. OneNote is part of the Microsoft Office suite; if you have Word and Excel, you probably have OneNote. And OneNote has built-in OCR. It can convert the text in images to plain text.

Open a OneNote page. Paste an image that contains text onto a OneNote page.  Right-click on the image, and select “Copy Text from Picture.”

OneNote has converted the text in the image to text and has copied that text to your clipboard. Now paste wherever you want the text to go. Like, in a blog post.

In Windows, the built-in clipboard can only hold one item. That means the next

time you copy a chunk of text, the previous chunk of text that you had copied is

erased. When grading assignments, I find that what I write for one student often

applies to other students. I know that some of you handle this by having, say, a

Word file that holds all of your common comments. But what if I told you that there

is an easier (and free!) way?

No, I don’t know why OneNote opted to use courier as its font, but I’m not going to complain. Now that it’s text, I can change the font to whatever I’d like anyway.

OneNote can handle some handwriting. I can write on my screen and ask OneNote to convert it to typewritten text. And it doesn’t do a bad job at it. But when I threw some awful handwriting at it as an image and asked for the OCR, well, the rendered text didn’t make much sense. Here’s some of it – and, no, this was not what was handwritten.

Dec yovx ‘9

(effee (o see

Do;nq T

O/k;nq to e-hJ tke—

AND -Ike— Z

But it didn’t do a bad job with this ad out of the 1860s Gloucester (Massachusetts) Directory.

ALEX, PATTILLO,

•WHOLESALE & RETAIL

FOREIGN AND DOMES’r1C

Goods ror Men’s Wear,

Dress Goods,

White Goods,

L’ren Goods,

Domestic Goods,

Straw Matting and Oil Carpets,

120 Front street,

Conclusion

If you have an image that contains text and you need that text to be text that you can edit, OneNote may be the easiest way to do the conversion.

In Windows, the built-in clipboard can only hold one item. That means the next time you copy a chunk of text, the previous chunk of text that you had copied is erased. When grading assignments, I find that what I write for one student often applies to other students. I know that some of you handle this by having, say, a Word file that holds all of your common comments. But what if I told you that there is an easier (and free!) way?

Ditto saves the last 500 (or however many you want) instances of whatever you’ve copied, such as text, images, files.

I use a keyboard shortcut (WIN + ‘) to get this pop up. Here are the 13 things I’ve copied. I can click on the one I want to paste it. Or I can use the arrow keys on my keyboard to scroll to the one I want and press enter to paste it. Or if it is one of the first ten, I can press the CONTROL key and a number on my keyboard to paste it.

The item at the top of the list is a file. I can go into any folder and paste this file. Item #9 is a graphic.

Want to see more on this screen? Mouse over the top of the pop up to get the double arrow, then click and drag.

You probably don’t want to see 500 items in this screen. Nor do you need to. The search is very fast! When the Ditto pop up screen appears, just start typing. Ditto begins a dynamic search of your clipboard items. That means that as you type, Ditto starts returning items that match your search. Here I typed “cop” and Ditto immediately gave me the 8 items out of the last 500 items I copied that contained that string of letters. Again, select the item to you want, and it will be pasted.

Because Ditto works at the level of the operating system, if you can type in the program, Ditto will paste in the program.

Ditto Options

To the right of the Ditto search box is the three-dot menu. Click on that to pull up your settings options.

[Side note: See the CF_DIBs that have appeared at the top of the Ditto pop up? Those are the screenshots I copied from my screen capture software, Snipping Tool.]

Click “Options…” to open a 9-tab settings window.

From the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab, choose your keyboard shortcut that will launch Ditto. I chose the Windows key (checkmarked the Win box) and apostrophe. When I hold down the Windows key and press the apostrophe, the Ditto pop up appears.

From the “General” tab, you can decide how many copies you want Ditto to keep. I chose 500. And, no, I don’t have any particular rationale for choosing that number. Also on this page, you can choose to play a sound when you copy something. Personally, I’d find this annoying, but if it’s your thing. (Know what would be awesome? On copy, Ditto would release a puff of smell that matched that of the fluid from a ditto machine.)

Item Options

Right-click on any copied item in the menu to bring up the options for that individual item.

You can move clips into groups. Let’s say that you copied comments you wrote on a particular assignment. You can right-click on each item, select groups, and move the clips into a group named for that assignment. [Pro-tip: Click and hold SHIFT and use your arrow keys to select multiple copies. Then right-click to select groups and move them all in at once. Or you can click and hold CONTROL and then click on the individual copies you want to move.]

I created a group called Blog. When I type blog into Ditto’s search, I see that item 7 is a group called blog. When I select that group, Ditto shows me the items in that group. And now I can select or search just within that group.

When I select that group, Ditto shows me the items in that group. Notice at the top that Ditto tells me I’m in the Blog group. And now I can select or search just within that group.

Conclusion

Ditto is packed with a lot of tweak-able features. Start with the basics. Once you get the hang of it, dive deeper into the settings. Or not. If what you’ve been using is the Windows clipboard where you get to copy and paste one item, then Ditto, out of the box, will give you exponentially more power.

I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts – any shortcuts, really. I want to spend less time running my computer and more time doing what needs to get done.

For Windows users, hold down the Windows key and press S. Your cursor will jump down to the Windows search box. Type in what you’re looking for, and you’re in business.

MaxLauncher ups your search and launch game. Use a keyboard shortcut to run MaxLauncher (I use CTRL – ‘), and then press a key on your keyboard to run a program, open a folder, or open a file.

I have my programs on the first tab. To open Chrome, on my keyboard, I press CTRL – ‘ (to run MaxLauncher) then g.

I have my commonly used folders on the second tab. To open the Psych Dept folder, CTRL – ‘ (to run MaxLauncher), then 2 (switches to the second tab), then p.

I have my commonly used files on the third tab. To open my fall syllabus, CTRL – ‘ (yep, that still runs MaxLauncher), then 3 (switches to the third tab), then f.

How cool is that?

Running MaxLauncher

Download MaxLauncher and run the installer program.

Run MaxLauncher and let’s get you set up.

1. Click “Settings” and select “Hotkey”. This will be the keyboard shortcut you use to run MaxLauncher. I like CTRL – ‘ because nothing else in Windows uses that keyboard shortcut. “Active tab” tells MaxLauncher which tab you want opened when it first runs. The first tab is a perfectly fine choice.

   

2. Now let’s add some programs. Click “View” and select “Drag and Drop Mode”. This allows you to, well, drag and drop stuff onto the MaxLauncher keys.

   

   To add Chrome, we need to find it in your file and folder structure. Go to the Windows search box (mouse down or type CTRL – S) and search for Chrome. When the result pops up, right-click on it and select “open file location”.

   

   When the folder launches, Chrome will already be highlighted. Click and drag onto the key in MaxLauncher you want to use as the keyboard shortcut for launching Chrome. I chose g for Google, but any key will work. Just make sure the key makes sense to you so you’ll remember it.

   

   Change your mind and want to use a different key? Click and drag to a different key. Want to move it to a different tab? Click and drag over, say, the second tab. You’ll see the keys for that second tab, and drop onto one of those keys.

   

   It’s exactly the same procedure for folders and files. Find what you want and drag it onto a key.

3. Rename your tabs by right-clicking on the tab and choosing “rename”.
4. Click “View” and click “Drag and Drop Mode” to unselect it. This will allow MaxLauncher to “Auto Hide” – meaning after you use your keyboard shortcut to launch, say, a program – MaxLauncher will minimize itself so it’s not hanging out on your screen.

   

   IMPORTANT: When you want to go back to adding programs, folders, or files to MaxLauncher, switch back to “Drag and Drop Mode”.

A special note about Microsoft Office

When you do a Windows search for any of the Office products, like Word, your search will give you a shortcut to Word, not the program itself. MaxLauncher needs the program; it can’t do anything with shortcuts.

In the Windows search box, type winword.exe. Right-click on the search result, and choose “open file location”. All of the Office programs should be in this folder.

Drag and drop these exe files onto MaxLauncher:

WINWORD.EXE to open Word
EXCEL.EXE to open Excel
ONENOTE.EXE to open OneNote
OUTLOOK.EXE to open Outlook
POWERPNT.EXE to open PowerPoint

Go slowly

You’re going to be tempted to put absolutely everything into MaxLauncher. Don’t – at least not right away. Choose the content you use all the time first. Once you get the hang of it – and are remembering to use it – then expand your shortcuts.

Amaze your family and coworkers

You’ll be sitting at your computer when a coworker walks in. “Hey, do you have a copy of that file we were working on?” You’ll press CTRL-‘ then F, and up will pop the file. And your coworker will say, “Whoa! What did you just do there?” Magic – just a little magic.

I go through a lot of half-sheets of paper in my courses. On one side, students write what they found interesting in that day’s class and what questions they have about the course material. On the other side are instructions for small group discussion. I’ve been using some version of these forms for a couple years now, but they seem to be in a constant state of flux. That means frequent revisions. That’s fine. That means I type up what I want at the top of the page and then I copy and paste it underneath. Then I put my cursor between the two versions and repeatedly hit enter until it looks like it’s about half way. And I repeat the process on page two for the backside of the half-sheets.

Yesterday, as I was doing this, I thought, “It’s 2017. There has to be a better way than just eyeballing what looks like half way.”

And there is!

In Word, click on the “Layout” tab, click “Margins,” and select “Custom Margins.”

In the pop up window, in the “Pages” section, click the dropdown menu next to “Multiple pages” and select “2 pages per sheet.”

Word will now show you a half sheet. Type up what you want. Hit enter a few times to add a new page or go to the “Insert” tab and click on “Page Break.” Copy and paste what you have on your first half sheet onto the second page. Add another page and type up what you want on the back of your half sheet. Add one more page and copy/paste the backside to page four.

Now print! Half pages 1 and 2 will print on the front of the sheet; half pages 3 and 4 will print on the back of the sheet.

Isn’t that a whole lot easier?

I’ve been doing a lot more small group work in my courses. When I let students choose their own groups, they tend to gravitate to the people they know best. That means that they frequently get the same perspective over and over again. I decided to assign students to groups, but counting off in class is a bit of a pain – students get all settled in their seats, they count off, and then they have to pick up all of their gear and move. And I suspect there’s the occasional (frequent) trading of groups since I don’t remember who said which number.

Sumit Bansal created an Excel spreadsheet that will randomize students into groups. Visit his website and download the Excel template file. You can find the download link at the end of the very first section of text.

The random team generator is in the first and only worksheet of the file.

Since I’m creating small groups twice a week for two different classes, I added two worksheets to this file, one for each of my classes. These worksheets only contain the names of my students. If I know a student will be absent, I move them into an out-of-the way column. For the students I expect to be in class, I copy and paste their names into the “random team generator.” If there are more names than rows in the generator page, the generator page automatically does what it needs to do to include them. If there are fewer names than rows assigned by the generator, just delete the excess rows; if you don’t, you’ll have blank spots in your groups.

Now that you have your student names in the generator, enter the number of teams you want, and click the bright orange button. If you don’t like the grouping, just click the button again.

I copy and paste the names – okay, I use the Snipping Tool in Windows – into a document I can show in class. This document is the first thing I pull up on the classroom computer so students know where they need to be as soon as they walk in the door.

I use an RSS feed reader to manage all of my news. I promise that soon I will write about my favorite news reader (Inoreader – for those in the know, it’s what Google Reader could have been).

Really, everything newsworthy, I send through Inoreader, including Twitter accounts I want to keep an eye on and a Twitter search for my Twitter handle so I can keep track of what is being tweeted about me without having to do frequent check-ins with Twitter or Hootsuite (my preferred social media manager).

Inoreader used to have the ability to bring in Twitter feeds, but at some point in the recent past, that functionality broke. That, of course, meant searching for a work around.

[Side note: You can send RSS feeds to Outlook. You can use IFTTT to send RSS feeds to just about anything, including as an email message, as a file in Dropbox or Google Drive. But that’s another blog post!]

But how to get Twitter converted to an RSS feed? TwitRSS.me is the solution.

Creating an RSS feed to follow a Twitter account

Here I enter the Twitter handle I want to follow and click the “Fetch RSS” button…

… and TwitRSS.me converts what is being sent out by that Twitter account into this mess of code.

Then I copy the URL for that mess of code and save it in my news feed reader. And the tweets magically appear. Any new tweet from that account will pop in at the top of this list.

Creating an RSS feed to follow a Twitter search term

Since I want to keep track of any mention of me on Twitter, I entered my handle (minus the @) as a search term. You could enter any search term here, including hashtags.

That generates a different mess of code.

Then I copy the URL for that mess of code and save it in my news feed reader. And the tweets magically appear. Any new tweet that results from that search will pop in at the top of this list.

What I love about dropping Twitter into Inoreader is that each tweet can be tagged so I can find them more easily later. For instance, I can tag Inoreader content, including these tweets, with “SueFrantz.com” if I think the content might make a good blog post.

Now that I’ve shown you how to convert Twitter to an RSS feed, I may finally get around to writing a post on Inoreader.

Let me explain.

Have you ever entered information in a web form, like a long, well-crafted comment you’ve written for a student in your course management system? And then when you clicked “submit” you got a notice that your page had timed out, or that you lost your internet connection? Or maybe you didn’t get around to clicking submit before you accidentally closed or reloaded the webpage? In any case, your comment is gone. Irreparably gone. And you have to type it all over again. Or what you can remember of it. In case, you’re certain the words you are retyping are not nearly as good as what you wrote the first time.

Lazarus, a Chrome extension (and Firefox add-on), has become my new best friend.

To recover lost text from a form field, I click the ankh icon in the top right corner of the field, and Lazarus shows me what I typed in that field in a menu with a light purple background. I can also see a bunch of other content I’ve recently typed in other web form fields. I can select anything from the list. Mousing over an option gives me the entire text in white pop up box. Clicking that option enters it into the form field.

This has become very handy given how much time I spend entering comments and other text in boxes in my course management system. Just recently I entered comments into a rubric for a particular student and then moved on to the next student… without saving the comments for the previous student. Doh! When I went back to the previous student, all of my comments were gone. But then I clicked on the ankh icon, and there were all of my comments, ready to be resurrected.

Almost just as recently, I was completing an online conference registration form. One entry box asked for a 50-word statement about something. I wrote it. And then when I clicked submit, I learned that my internet had hiccupped. I got a page-timeout error. When I got reconnected to the internet, and reloaded the page… Yep. Everything was gone, including my concise, brilliant 50-word statement.

Unfortunately, that was before I had installed Lazarus.

But installing it was the very next thing I did.

Do you need to keep track of receipts for reimbursement or for your taxes? Danae Hudson and Brooke Whisenhunt of Missouri State University recommend Expensify. Expensify is free. If you need more power, you can pay a small monthly fee.

In the past I’ve used CamScanner to turn my phone’s camera into a scanner, scanning my receipts to pdf and then uploading the pdf to Dropbox for safekeeping. Expensify uses the same technology, but to a very specific end. I should also add that those of you with flip phones are not left out. The web interface for Expensify works just fine. Use whatever scanner you have to scan your receipts, and then upload them to the Expensify website.

For those with phones with cameras, install the mobile app. This is what Expensify looks like on my phone right now. You can see that I have a number of items for a trip I named InstructureCon 2016. To the left of each item is a thumbnail of my receipt. Because I don’t have receipts for per diem because, well, it’s per diem, there is no thumbnail.

To add a new receipt, just tap the green camera icon in the bottom right corner of your phone’s screen. You can also tap “NEW” in the top, right corner and select “receipt”. In either case, your phone’s camera turns on, and you can take a photo of your receipt. You can do that sitting right at your restaurant table. If it’s one of those ridiculously dark restaurants – one where you need your phone’s flashlight app to read the menu – you can turn on the flash. The photo of the receipt will automatically appear at the top of your receipts list. Expensify guesses that your most recent trip is the trip you want the receipt attached to. If that’s not right, it’s easily changeable.

Tap on that newly-added item to add important information, like merchant name and how much you paid. Expensify enters today’s date by default, but you can change it. Include a comment – I note the reason for the expense. Tap on “Category” to assign the receipt to lodging, meals, transportation, etc. You can create your own tags to mean whatever you’d like. Since I use Expensify to keep track of all of my travel expenses, both reimbursable and, for those that aren’t reimbursable, tax deductible, I have tags called “Reimbursable” and “Tax deductible”. I also have a tag named “Non-reimbursable/non-tax deductible” that I use when, for example, my wife is traveling with me on a work trip and my portion of the meal is reimbursable (or tax deductible), but hers is not. (Expensify allows the splitting of receipts that makes this easy to track.) Be sure the receipt goes with the correct report. Tapping on “Report” will show you your active reports and allow you to create a new one. Finally, toggle the switches for “Billable” and “Reimbursable” as needed. [“Hey, Sue, if there’s a ‘Reimbursable’ toggle, why do you need a ‘reimbursable’ tag?” Good question. In the report Expensify generates, tags are prominently displayed, so it’s just easier to see.]

Expensify has an easy-to-navigate web interface. On the “Expenses” tab, you can sort by date, merchant name, amount paid, category (e.g., transportation, lodging), tag (which you’ve created), or comment. On the left side of the screen, you can search and filter as you’d like. Click on an expense to edit it. If you click on the paper (or +) icons between the total column and the category column, you can edit the details for the item, and do things like split the expense and upload pdfs. Uploading pdfs is very helpful for emailed receipts, for example. Save the emailed receipt as a pdf, and then upload to Expensify. [Want to add/remove categories and tags? Click on your icon in the top, right corner of any Expensify webpage, and click the “Personal settings” button.]

When you’re done with your trip, click on “Reports” in the top navigation menu. Click on the report you want.

Use the right navigation menu to edit expenses, share with others, print, download a pdf, add an attachment to the report.

Since my college doesn’t officially use Expensify, I don’t use the “Submit” button. Instead I download the pdf report. The pdf includes a summary of all expenses, thumbnails of each receipt, plus a full image of each receipt. Because my college accepts photocopies of receipts, I just fill out my college’s travel reimbursement form and then attach this report as the record of my receipts. Even if my college didn’t accept copies of receipts, I’d probably still submit the report along with the original receipts. When the report includes tax deductible items, I also print out a copy for my records. (Ok. My wife’s records – she handles our finances.)