Tag Archives: Tip

Miscellaneous – Rotate Pages in Adobe Reader

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Have you ever received a PDF file, only to discover once you open it the pages are upside down?

This happens to me quite frequently at work, when multiple pages are scanned to PDF using a sheet feeder. If the paper is not in good condition, due to stapling or whatever, the scan is done from bottom to top and unless the full Adobe Acrobat is used can not be rotated before sending.

While this is aggravating, if you want to read the document directly from the computer, there is a way to do this without turning you monitor upside down or standing on your head.

The following directions apply to Adobe Reader v7.0.8, but should be similar, if not the same, in earlier versions:

To rotate left click on the Rotate View button twice.Rotate View Button Image

If the Rotate View button is not showing in your Reader window, select View on the menu bar, then Toolbars and make sure Rotate View is checked. (See image below.)
Rotate View Button Activation Image

If you are going to print out the file to read it, rotating is not necessary.

Google – Exact Phrase Searching

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You have moved to a new area and want to find a computer user group nearby. You go to Google.com and search for: computer user group,(results: about 366,000,000).

To search for the exact phrase in Google just enclose the same phrase in double quotation marks like this: “computer user group”, (results: about 123,000).

It should be a lot easier to narrow down when you use an exact phrase search. As you can see by the very broad example above, you would have to dig through over 300 million results of sites without the exact phrase, but only a little over 100 thousand with the exact phrase.

If I search within the 100 thousand for CT (Connecticut) it is narrowed down to 587, for MD (Maryland) 810, etc.

Coming up with a good search phrase and searching for that exact phrase, should keep you from getting frustrated.

Open XML Spreadsheet in Excel

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I was at my Business Agent’s office the other day and she was emailed a file, which she could not open after saving to her desktop.

The file in question contained spreadsheet information so she was double clicking on the file, thinking it would open up in Microsoft Excel but, it would not open.

She was on the phone with the sender, trying to resolve the problem.

I happened to see that the file had an .xml extension and when she hovered over the file name, the file properties showed it as being an “XML Spreadsheet”. These clues told me that the file had been sent in an XML (EXtensible Markup Language) format, not Microsoft Excel.

I told her to:

  • Open her Excel applications.
  • Go to the File menu.
  • Select Open from the drop down menu.
  • Navigate to the file on her desktop that needed to be opened.
  • Select the file (Change the File Type to All Files, if necessary).
  • Click Open.

This opened the file in Excel and she was able to access the information. I say that she was able to access the information because the XML file only contains the information with minimal set up; she ended up having to go in and setting up the header, footer, repeating row, etc. to manipulate the information.

This worked because she had Excel 2003. From what I have found Microsoft Office 2003 and above includes XML reading capabilities. OpenOffice is also capable of reading XML files.

XML is a much more involved subject than can be handled in a blog like this. Also, I am just now reading about XML and doing a little experimentation on utilizing it.

From what little I have read about XML and its implementation, XML will be more prevelant in the very near future, as the information needs to be written only once and then can be presented in many different ways very easily. For an overview of XML check out this information at the Wikipedia site: Extensible Markup Language.