Microsoft Visio 2013 Part I

This is the 9th installment in my blog post series on Microsoft Visio 2013 which is based on what I learn on the video training course by VTC on this software. The types of stencils or shapes you put on your workspace often have options specific to them. When you right click the shape these are among the commands that come up. Find and Replace is under home/ editing and you will usually enter the text to find and whether or not to replace each instance before moving on the next instance. If you left click a diagram you can go into process/ diagram validation. There are various options to check a diagram and you either repair it and then re check it to make a warning go away or click ignore this issue. You can turn several shapes in a diagram showing several processes which might be in something like manufacture. You select the shapes and click process/ subprocess/ create from selection. The other processes shown will normally be relegated to subprocesses or a single process. You can use subprocess shapes but that is optional. In the file tab is the print dialog box. A dotted line diagram compares the workspace to the print paper. This is shown in page set up with the other various options. There is an edit header and footer option that can put it on either every page or alternate pages. You go into that dialog box and just delete the text to remove a header or footer or both. File/ info has the options for deleting personal information or metadata from a drawing. This might be information like the author's name and address of work. The various information is displayed on the right and you can click on a field and edit it or select the remove personal information where you just select the options. If you use a template it prevents the initial drawing being modified which can happen if the person clicks save rather than save as. If you go into file/ save as in save as type choose visio template  and then to get it displayed in the templates folder you have to go into new/ options in file and select the various options to say what is locked in the template and name it. The next installment in this series will be the end and I'll try and do that later tonight.

Windows Azure

The book I read to research this post was Introducing Windows Azure For IT Professionals Technical Overview by Mitch Tulloch which is a very good book which I downloaded for free from kindle. There is a version in book form of this and Microsoft Press have released it free on kindle so people who are likely to implement Azure have a way of getting up to speed without having to shell out loads of money. There have apparently been 750 thousand downloads and of course there are lots of more specialist books about Azure by Microsoft Press that people can but. It is an online database that is a cloud computing offering and strictly speaking the software is run on the online server and you are not given a disc to run on a local machine so it isn't classed as a hybrid cloud. It works with Windows 2012 R2 & other software such as Sharepoint. Microsoft are constantly bringing out add ons for this online service such as Biz Talk and also it does all work with some versions of Linux. A lot of people use the Visual Studio Online Cloud Service with Azure as it lets them write their own addons and customize it. A lot of people use Hadoop with the database and I think that also works with the Amazon Web databases. There are 8 regional data centers around the world and in Europe they are based at Dublin & Amsterdam. This book is a decent length and goes into using Azure in quite a lot of detail. When using the cloud service your first 5 GB is free but you are also charged on things like the number of instances running. For a company it is quite competitive when you consider the cost of having an onsite server and things like software to. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book although in places it was a little tricky to understand but I definitely recommend downloading it on kindle and Microsoft are releasing free e-books about a lot of their products which I will be reviewing and would recommend.

Scrivener

The book I read to research this post was Scrivener For Dummies by Gwen Hernandez which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. Scrivener is a writing software initially released for the Apple Macintosh and particularly for the OS X Lion operating system and I think the version in this book is a previous version which at the time had a cut down Windows version although in future both versions will have similar features. I did look on Google to see how much this software is and it is free for 30 days and $40 thereafter. The company that make it is literature and latte. It is particularly suited to writers as they can keep all there work in one place which it does with folders and subfolders. It also allows you to do e-books particularly in pdf and you can import your work including notes and annotations into Microsoft Word. There is a kind of add on at http://crowl.info which is a word counter useful for editing for things like magazines and newspapers. The book does a decent job of explaining how to use it although this software has been superceded by Scrivener 2 which hopefully there will be a follow up book on. The book explains where there are differences between the windows and mac versions although in the later version the features in the windows version are comparable. I really enjoyed reading it and think the price of the software does sound quite reasonable. I'd never heard of this software prior to reading this book and apparently the word scrivener is a fancy word meaning writer. It's an interesting book.

Visual Social Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Visual Social Marketing For Dummies by Krista Neher which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. This book is about marketing your business through visual mediums like photographs, videos and presentations. Slideshare is the biggest social network devoted to presentations which most people do in Microsoft Powerpoint. Video is mostly shown through sites like Vimeo & YouTube although you can use mainstream sites like Facebook. There is a site called Instashare that lets you put on it up to 15 seconds of video. Of course many of these sites have pro packages you pay for and get additional features. There is also Pinterest where you get a tiny program which is a virtual pin that goes into your browser and when you see something you like you click it and it is embedded into your page on Pinterest. There are social bookmarking sites that work in a similar and it is worth bearing in mind a lot of what you see on the internet is copyright and you should embed it rather than copy it which infringes the copyright. This book is quite interesting but didn't have that much knowledge I didn't already know although I have read lots of similar books. I think most people would find it interesting. A lot of marketing is done with smartphones and there are apps like Vine for video editing & Photoshop Express for photo editing to help with this. Even laptops are a bit cumbersome so most people use a phone or tablet for this purpose. There is also sites like Google + and Twitter that are mainstream social media sites but have a very receptive audience for photos in particular. I did enjoy reading this book and I think it gives you the nuts and bolts for promoting your business. There is also in the Part of Tens lists of 10 types of photos and 10 types of video you can use for promoting your business. It would work equally well with promoting something like your charity or even song.

Microsoft Visio 2013 Part H

This is the 8th installment in my blog post series on Microsoft Visio 2013 based on what I learn on the video training course by VTC about that software. In this post I am going to continue my look at containers. These are similar to groups in that both turn objects into a single item at a particular level. If you click on a container with objects inside it the format tab appears which is context sensitive. If you click format/ select container it selects the container and everything in it. You can drag objects out of a container which then become separate unlike groups. You can click format/ disband container which gets rid of the container but leaves the contents intact. There are also on the format ribbon various options for changing the heading. You can drag shapes into a container which then automatically become part of it unlike groups. You can select the container or its contents and apply quick styles to them. When you lock a container which is on the format ribbon you can't disband it or drag shapes out of it but can delete it with the delete key.

You can apply a callout to a picture with the command insert/ callout. That is the best way as you can apply the callout to the picture it is attached to. There are other methods but they don't apply it to the picture it's attached to and you have to be carefull if you move it around. A callout is like a thought cloud or speech box which are both types of callout. There are other types too. Basically it's a kind of text box. A hyperlink links text to information which can be a URL or other type of information. You can link a diagram or text including a local file with a hyperlink. The hyperlink command is insert/ hyperlink. You usually click browse in the dialog box to add the location automatically. You can enter a description which appears as a tool tip when someone's mouse hovers over it. To delete a hyperlink go into the dialog box and select the hyperlink address and click delete and then ok. If you connect the subaddress to the hyperlink with the browse button specifically for that it lets you attach a part of the page or document to it. You can attach it to a drawing but must name it and put the exact name in the subaddress box. There is also a zoom feature and you will choose the width feature that only zooms to the width of that page. By using control+click you can bring up multiple hyperlinks where they are set up for a single bit of text. You then choose one from the pop up menu. To set up multiple hyperlinks merely use the add key and enter the hyperlinks into the box in the dialog box.

Stealth Warplanes

The book I read to research this post was Stealth Warplanes by Doug Richardson which is a very good book which I bought from a car boot sale. This book was published in 1989 so is probably a bit out of date but is quite interesting because there is a whole plethora of aircraft incorporating stealth technology including the quite well known F-117A Stealth Fighter. It does have other aircraft like the U2 & Blackbird but a lot of the aircraft I had never heard of and a lot never made it past the prototype stage. Of course the aircraft we know about are mostly out of service or old and the latest technology often referred to as black ops is mostly top secret. Most of the stealth aircraft fly at less than the speed of sound because things like having quiet engines and appearing insignificant on radar wouldn't work. Often they are used over fairly short distances for detailed reconaissance although there are some super quick aircraft where the aim is to out run missiles. An example is the SR-71A Blackbird where for many years the only country that could shoot it down due to their incredible speed and flight altitude was the Soviet Union although there were reports the North Koreans did their best to shoot them down. The Stealth Fighter is composed of a low density carbon composite that doesn't show up on radar. In the Second World War the Japanese Warships painted to resemble smaller less significant ships from a distance and the British painted their Canberra's camouflage green on top and sky grey underneath so the roots of this go back quite a long way. There are aircraft that have the heat from their engine outlets diffused and often have quietened piston engines. There are various decoy measures to fool missiles and another system is to flood the air defences with decoy missiles so genuine ones can get through. Of course yet another measure is spy satellites but to get the right information often requires a closer look and these satellites can often be fooled. If you see this book being sold cheaply secondhand it is worth reading and I did learn quite a bit from it as well as enjoyed it.

Corporate Blogging

The book I read to research this post was Corporate Blogging For Dummies by Douglas Karr which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com . This book is about blogging as it relates to big companies. They normally use a specialist blog platform like Wordpress VIP or Compendium and will have a theme specially written for the job. One thing it says in the book is you must give the bloggers time to settle in and develop their style as bloggers. I know when I initially started blogging I tried to write about subjects and gradually found doing book reviews where I tried to give people an idea of some of the things that were in a book was better. Quite a bit of this book is on SEO, Google Analytics and landing pages, much of which I have covered in other books. They are important in corporate blogging where you want what you write to be read by quite a large audience. Google Analytics can be linked to many blogs and gives feedback on things like what people read and demographics of your audience. Of course with a big company you might want something more heavy duty like Omniture. An important thing is don't just regurgitate your sales spiel but try and put information in that people can't find elsewhere particularly about your products. You can compare your company to your competition although you have to be realistic about this and make sure the competition doesn't ridicule what you say. You should try and develop a chatty style where you tell people about every aspect of your company. It isn't just buyers you will visit your blogs and you should have a customized URL and preferably have blogs in the name to let people know what it is. Smaller companies might use a platform like Typepad or Moveable Type or even a self hosted Wordpress blog. You can get the Wordpress software which is open source and free at http://wordpress.org . Many like this option because of the huge amount of potential customization available and plug ins. I did quite enjoy this book which covers the topic well.