PowerPoint Animation -- Selection Window Time Saver

As a "PowerPoint" engineer (aka UVa Systems grad), I am ashamed to not have known about the "Selection and Visibility" feature in PP2007.

Basically, this shows you a list of all the objects on your slide, for which you can proceed to give meaningful names. This is helpful in keeping things straight when making a slide with a lot of graphics and animations. Instead of working with a bunch of objects (some of which are hidden by others) with names like "Picture 9" and "Picture 13", you can use meaningful names like"PHL in 2007" and "PHL in 2012".

To do this click on "Home", then "Select->Selection Window..." (button in the Editing window on the far right-hand side of the screen). This produces a pane which lists all the objects on the screen. You can even hide some object so that it is easier to select and manipulate the underlying ones.

I know this is my lamest post ever, but this feature made me happy for a few minutes.

Win a new hard drive... or at least more space

What is the difference between getting a bigger hard drive and creating more space on the one you have. Creating space is cheaper, faster, easier, and more fun!


Windirstat is a free program I ran across today at work when the IT guy told me I should probably free up some space on my hard drive.

I've known for some time that I'd need to do some HD spring cleaning, but I didn't want to take hours searching through folders to find big files that I don't need. So I turned to Google. I Googled something to the effect of, "hard drive space management," and was presented with a most awesome tool (in the process I discovered a totally rad website chock full of other nifty Windows [and mac] utilities, Lifehacker.com).

Basically, windirstat produces a visualization of you hard drive which makes it easy to see what's eating up all that extra space. For me, at home it was a couple video files, duplicated music, and some video games. The easy-to-use interface let's you quickly delete old, dusty files by quickly drilling down into your biggest folders to find the biggest files each contains. So many of these files are unnecessary. With a fast Internet connection you could re-download in no time if you ever needed the file again.

Take a look at the visualization of my HD below: