Month: January 2014

Excel, usability, user interface, Word

IT Haiku Poetry

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According to Wikipedia, a haiku  is a short poem which uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition.

I have read haikus and as per the definition, they most often relate to nature. However, I think that our constant interaction with information technology sometimes brings out moments of searing clarity and other times a pensive mood, which can best be captured in the haiku format. Therefore I have tried my hand at creating some: Continue reading IT Haiku Poetry →

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Excel, tricks, Word

Word count Excel for authors

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I never started writing after a conscious decision. Tulagi Hotel, my 134,000 word novel, came about after I chanced to write the first chapter at the office, over an extended coffee break, and with no intention of making it into a full-fledged book.

But when it was published, I found myself writing short stories. In a span of six months, I wrote 16 stories. At this time, I became interested in tracking the word counts of the stories. This is interesting for two reasons: most short story competitions have word limits, and it is nice to know the progress of your Work in Progress (WIP) files. Of course you can just note the word count and manually copy it to an Excel sheet, but I thought to make that process automatic. I will explain how, and also, share my file under the CC-BY-NC license. Continue reading Word count Excel for authors →

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PowerPoint, tricks

Powerpoint and image processing

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Sometimes we all have a need to write instructions, or add information to an image, or combine many pictures to one. Of course you can do this using an image processing software such as Paint, GIMP, or Photoshop, but many times these are not available. And of course, what you can do in Paint is crude in the extreme, because it is a bitmap editor and not a real image editor.

Paint especially is not very good for this sort of work, because its resizing capabilities are not up to par, and whatever you insert into the picture gets inserted in it for good – revising text or moving an image in a composite are not possible. Using GIMP or Photoshop is somewhat easier due to the use of layers, which enables you to maintain texts and other adornments in editable form before you export the image, but the set of available arrows, stars, and other thingies is not very large without installing plug-ins.

Continue reading Powerpoint and image processing →

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