Centre for Social Justice -» Community

May 8, 2014 - Quick posters

Some tips on how to make a nice poster to advertize your events.

1. Using GIMP, make a PDF poster. Use the standard 8 1/2 by 11 paper in landscape mode. Remember to make it 300ppi for the print version and 72ppi for the web version. To save on costs, try and fit all the information on half a page.
2. Place your guides about 4mm away from the edge. And place two guides in the middle, leaving space for 8mm margin.
3. Doing a blend of two colors for the background makes it look more professional.
4. And then add your title, description of the event and always remember to put the date/time/address.
5. When you're happy with one side of the poster, copy it and paste it in the second half of the page.
6. And you can use this as a template to make different versions of the poster to put on your website and share on social websites. A square jpg of about 200 or 250 pixels for your website. And a wide version (about 1000px by 300px) for social media.

Here's a video to show this method using GIMP.

Mar 27, 2014 - Spreadsheet tip: autofill

Spreadsheets make it easy to autofill cells. For example, if there's a pattern, just enter the first three cells of the pattern (like Jan, Feb, Mar), then select all three cells, and click on the bottom-right corner, and drag it down. When you release the mouse, the cells will be filled-in (if it recognises the pattern). If the pattern you want to use is not recognised, you can create your own under Tools - Options.

Also, if you have a cell with a formula, you can use the same autofill function, by clicking on the bottom-right, and drag to the desried position, and the formulas will be filled in automatically.

Here's a video to show this function.

Mar 13, 2014 - YouTube tips

Here are a coupe of handy tips for sharing YouTube videos.

1. You can easily share YouTube videos by using the "Share" button just below the video. You can also specify a starting point if you want to select a particular moment. Or you can just add
"?t=25s" (to start at 25 seconds) to the end of the URL.

2. Each YouTube video has three thumbnail images, and the owner of the video is allowed to select one defualt thumbnail image. You can access all these images by going to the URL directly. For example, if this is the URL of the video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS3QOtbW4m0

You can access the default thumbnail image by changing the address to this:
img.youtube.com/vi/BS3QOtbW4m0/0.jpg

This is the pattern to follow:
* change "www" to "img"
* change "watch?v=" to "vi"
* add "/0.jpg" to the end of the URL to get the default image, and the other three (smaller) thumbnails can be accessed like this: 1.jpg, 2.jpg and 3.jpg

Feb 27, 2014 - Spreadsheet tip: freeze headers

Spreadsheets tend to have lots of data, and sometimes it is hard to remember what the columns mean. A useful tip is to give each column a header (and the rows too, if needed). Then put the cursor in a cell below the header (and one cell to the right) and then go to the menu - Window - Freeze. Now when you scroll down the window, the headers will remain visible.

Here's a video and animated gif to show this function.

Feb 20, 2014 - 10 top time-saving tech tips

Tech columnist David Pogue shares 10 simple, clever tips for computer, web, smartphone and camera users. And yes, you may know a few of these already -- but there's probably at least one you don't. For example, press the space bar to scroll-down one page, and shift-space to scroll-up. Watch the video to get the other 9 tips.

www.ted.com

Feb 13, 2014 - Sorting data in a spreadsheet

It is very easy to sort data in a spreadsheet with a simple click of a button (A-Z or Z-A). But there is one very important aspect to remember, do you want to maintain the relationship of the sorted cells across rows or not. If you click on a single cell, and click the sort button, the first row is assumed to be a header, and then everything else is sorted. But if you select just one column, then that column will be sorted, but it will break the integrity of the data across rows.

To test this, create a few cells containing this data:
Header: Col1, Col2, Col2
Row 1: a, b, c
Row 2: 1,2,3
Row 3: x,y,z

And then play with the sort buttons by clicking on different single cells, or a bunch of cells together to see different sort results.