The Digital: August 2011

28.8.11

Disable the “Protected View” Mode in Office 2010

read only document

Microsoft Office 2010 includes a new “Protected View” that, by default, will open all Outlook attachments and documents downloaded from the Internet in “read-only” mode.

For instance, if a colleague has sent you a spreadsheet as an email attachment, when you double-click that file, it will only open as a read-only document inside Excel. The same holds true for Word and PowerPoint files as well. In the Protected Mode, you are neither able to edit your documents nor can you send them to the printer.

How to Disable Protected View

You can easily switch from the Protected View to Edit mode with a click but if you would like to permanently turn off that security setting such that all your future email attachments /web documents open in regular mode, here’s the required setting.

Launch Microsoft Word, or any of the Office 2010 programs, and go to File –> Options –> Trust Center –> Trust Center Settings.

Click “Protected View” here and deselect the option that says “Enable Protected View for Outlook Attachments.” If you get stuck, follow this screencast:

View the original article here

23.8.11

A New Dropbox Edition for your Business

dropbox for teams Dropbox today introduced a new edition for small businesses and other organizations who are considering moving to a cloud based solution for file sharing and synchronization .

Aptly named as Dropbox for Teams, this edition offers all the features that are available in the standard Dropbox edition but here, you buy a single pool of storage space that is then shared by all the other members of your team.

As an admin, you can centrally manage the whole Dropbox account and add /remove users as per need, buy additional storage for the common pool and more. Unlike the standard edition where the maximum space that you can have is 100 GB per account, Dropbox for Teams edition lets you buy as much storage as you need for the whole team.

Now comes the pricing. The Dropbox for Teams plan starts at $795/year and this comes with 350 GB of storage to be shared among five users. It sounds steep but if you have enough users in your organization using the 100 GB Dropbox plan for official purposes, the team edition actually turns out be less expensive. However, here you don’t have the option to pay monthly.

View the original article here

19.8.11

An Undocumented Google Search Operator

Search operators in Google help you refine and improve search results.

For instance, a query like “Taj Mahal AND Hotel” will search for pages related to the Hotel Taj and not the Mughal monument. Similarly, “kindle -site:amazon.com” will find all Kindle related resources outside the Amazon website.

This Google cheat sheet [PDF] has a nice overview of all the popular search operators that are supported in Google. Other than this “official” list, Google also supports an undocumented search operator called AROUND(n) that will help you find documents where the distance between two search terms is around ‘n.’

Here are some examples.

google around

Daniel Russell, who first wrote about the AROUND operator, says that AROUND is especially useful when the documents are rather long (think book-length articles) while a comment points out that it could be also be useful “when searching for quotes, speeches or a song that’s stuck in your head, but you can only think of a few words from it.”

Coming back to our original example, a query like “CNN Obama” will mostly show CNN pages that are related to Obama. However, if we modify the query to look like “CNN AROUND(2) Obama,” you get results where these two terms are written in close proximity.

The higher the number, the less the proximity.

google around 10

Google’s wildcard search operator, represented by Asterisk (Obama * CNN), may achieve similar results but with AROUND, you even get to specify the distance between the two search terms. Do remember to write AROUND in all CAPS else it won’t work.

Thank you Pedro Dias for the tip.

View the original article here