Make stylish docs with Microsoft Word

Word styles and themes are often overlooked but are a great asset especially when you are regularly publishing a newsletter and want consistency of the look to your documents. Much is made of templates and jolly useful they are too if you want to make the layout of the document the same every time that you use it.

What is a style?

A style is a set of rules that you can apply to text for consistency

e.g. the main body text of your document might be like this

FONT                Calibri, 10pt, italic, green
ALIGNMENT   Left
PARAGRAPH   single line

What is a theme?

A theme is a collection of styles that you can save to use on multiple documents like a template file but for text only.

I can just use the format painter, why use a theme?

The format painter is great but themes can be adjusted globally. In other words any change of theme or style will affect all instances of the text across the document. So if your editor wishes to change the font for the newsletter from Century Gothic to Creeper for a Halloween feel then changing the font  in the theme has an instant effect On the design menu pick the Fonts drop down and choose customize fonts from the bottom of the menu.

more...

different kinds of files

Hi All Look into my shared folder by clicking the image of Bexhill beach

Now download the following files

(clue highlight > Right click (or ctrl click) Download)

Making mailing labels using the wizard in office 2016

At this time of year it is time to drag out the address book and start writing all those Christmas cards to friends and family. I wonder just how many people have moved or changed their family affairs in the last year. A mailing list on your computer really helps with such mundane tasks. Dog eared address books are being replaced by the next generation on their phones.

Using Microsoft Excel we can maintain an address list that can be simply updated and used in combination with Word to print out mailing labels or address books whenever we need them. we can even sort them for posting or emailing.

I have posted two tutorials to help you out with this one.

Making an address book with Excel

Making mailing labels with Word and Excel

Have fun and say goodbye to trying to read your own crossings out and scrawl on an address book from the 80's

Touch up and restore old photos

I have been editing and restoring photos for many years and love the change in the world and the people in it. Photos used to be so prim as people had them as a treat. The only pictures that look so stuffy now are those from weddings. Nowadays we are so used to seeing smartphones and cameras around we don't blink when somebody takes a picture. Of course so many of them are simply taking pictures of themselves.

The most common issues with old photos are not cracks and tears but colour loss and fading. Most modern photo editors do a great job of restoring such things within minutes. Amateurs carrying out retouching struggle not through technical limits but tend to work with a copy of the photo which is too small.

Photos of 15cm x 10.4cm or less are the most common that I come across especially of former service people and football team. More recent photos are much larger and usually show water or colour fading blurring the images. Images from flat bed scanners made actual size are common looking great on phones but being only 450 pixels x 300 pixels not so good to print as they are losing lots of detail.

Tablets and phones have great scanner apps (like Microsoft Office Lens) that take high quality images and correct for distortion. I can't help but think that they will not be as good as a properly scanned image at 1200 or 4800 dpi (dots per inch).

A few tips that have served me well.

• Work in black and white on old photos
• Crop images after you have done as much repair work as possible
• Know when to stop and don't make the images too perfect as they look false when they are over restored
• If the starting image is very small then re-sample it larger, do your editing and then re-sample it smaller before printing out
• Remember the rule of thirds when making images larger for print, upscale no more than 1/3 larger to produce the best images.

Follow this link for getting started with repairing old images