Taking a look at IBM Lotus Symphony Presentations

Continuing with my first-look series covering the IBM Lotus Symphony office suite, I’ve created a gallery covering the slideshow application, Symphony Presentations. (I covered Symphony Documents in the first gallery and Symphony Spreadsheets in the second gallery.)

As you’ll discover, while Symphony Presentations contains everything you will need to create effective slideshows, it lacks many of the bells and whistles you’ll find in Microsoft PowerPoint and, surprisingly, even its cousin, OpenOffice Impress.

You can download the Lotus Symphony suite and try Presentations yourself.

Keep in mind that Lotus Symphony is listed as Beta 1. However, since the suite has essentially been extracted from the final version of Lotus Notes 8, it’s actually pretty solid. That’s not to say that I didn’t encounter any snags — but they were fairly minor.

You can download it from here also

Convert Word graphics to AutoShapes to type text directly on your images

While you can use a text box to add a word or two to your Word document pictures, it is easier to position text typed directly onto the picture itself. While Word does not let you type directly onto a pasted picture, it does let you add text to AutoShapes. By turning your picture into an AutoShape, you can type directly on it. Follow these steps:

1. Right-click any toolbar.
2. Click Drawing.
3. Click AutoShapes on the Drawing toolbar.
4. Point to Basic Shapes and click Rectangle.
5. Click and drag in your document where you want to position the rectangle.
6. Click the Fill Color button’s drop-down arrow in the Drawing toolbar.
7. Click Fill Effects and then click the Picture tab.
8. Click the Select Picture button.
9. Navigate to the picture and click Insert. Click OK.
10. With the shape still selected, right-click the shape and select Add Text.
11. Type the text you want at the prompt.
12. Select and right-click the text.
13. Click Font.
14. Choose the desired font, font size, color, etc. from the Font dialog box and then click OK.

You can position the text within the shape by adding blank lines, spacing, indents, or any other paragraph formatting you wish.

Let Excel e-mail your weekly reports

If you have to send the same worksheet to a number of people every week, it probably takes you quite awhile to prepare the e-mail. If you have to do this for a number of reports, it can take even longer. Follow these steps to have Excel e-mail the reports for you:

1. Open the workbook containing the report you want to send.
2. Press [Alt][F11].
3. In the Project-VBA Project pane, double-click ThisWorkbook.
4. Go to Insert | Procedure.
5. Click in the Name text box and enter WeeklyReportEmail. Click OK.
6. At the prompt, enter the following code:
Dim DistList As Variant
DistList = Array("name1@company.com", "name2@company.com", "name3@company.com")
ActiveWorkbook.Sendmail Recipients: = DistList
7. Press [Alt]Q.
8. Press [Alt][F8].
9. Click WeeklyReportEmail in the Macro list.
10. Click the Options button.
11. In the Ctrl+ box, enter m. Click OK.

Now when you need to send a report to everyone on your distribution list just open the workbook and press [Ctrl]M.