Tip of the Day

1 and 3 are free.

Five top alternatives to PowerPoint

By Susan Harkins

If you have Office, you have PowerPoint, presentation software that’s easy to use and cause for debate among users and experts alike. You love it or you hate it. But if you hate it or you just don’t want to purchase Office, you’re not stuck. There are alternatives and most of them will get the job done just fine.

Note: This list is also available as a photo gallery.

1: Impress

OpenOffice.org Impress is part of the free OpenOffice.org suite of business software. The user interface, shown in Figure A, is amazingly similar to PowerPoint 2003. If you can use PowerPoint, you’ll be up and running with Impress in minutes. Like PowerPoint, Impress offers master slides, layout options, object inspection via right-clicking, animation, transitions, and plenty of toys.

Figure A

OpenOffice.org Impress is similar to PowerPoint 2003.

Technically, it’s free (and open source). If you use it, consider a donation to help support and maintain the community.

2: Prezi

If you’re looking for a cloud-based presentation app, take a look at Prezi.com. It uses Adobe Flash to quickly create edgy animated presentations. There are no slides. Instead, you store everything on a huge canvas and then choreograph the show. To create a new Prezi, supply a name and description, as shown in Figure B. Then, choose a blank Prezi or a template. (The first time you use Prezi, you’ll have the opportunity to view a short tutorial.) Figure C shows a blank Prezi, ready for text and graphics. You can even convert PowerPoint slides to a Prezi.

Figure B

All Prezis start here.

Figure C

Add presentation text and graphics to this blank canvas.

Although Prezi is easy to learn, it’s different enough that it might intimidate you just a bit. Prezi’s zooming nature gives it a bit of a contemporary edge, but it won’t be right for every presentation. When it is right, it’ll be just the right tool.

You can play in the cloud free, but all your Prezis are public. You can, however, download them and present offline. A private subscription is $59 a year, and for $159 a year, you can add full support to your subscription.

3: Google Presentation

If you haven’t tried Google Docs Presentation in a while, take another look. Google recently revamped the app and it’s got a lot more to offer than before. Just pull up Google.com and choose Documents from the More menu. If you don’t have an account, you’ll need to create one. Once you’re in, click Create and choose Presentation. Work through the tutorial to the user interface shown in Figure D. This Web-based app requires a recent version of Internet Explorer or Chrome to tap into its newest features. Google Docs is free, but you’re working in the cloud.

Figure D

Google Docs Presentation interface is utilitarian but effective.

4: SlideRocket

Another Web-based presentation app, SlideRocket, offers some impressive and advanced animations and transitions. It’s a good choice for creating a Web presentation. Searching for and adding Web content requires just a few clicks. (The interface might seem unfamiliar at first, so take the short tutorial.) You’ll spend most of your time working in the Editing window, shown in Figure E. It’s probably the most comprehensive alternative, when compared to PowerPoint. But the free version lets you publish only as a Web URL — you can’t view your work offline. For $24 a month (per user), you can download your presentation as a PowerPoint or PDF file.

Figure E

Manipulate slides in the Editing window.

5: Flair

Wildform’s Flair is a desktop app that produces Flash-based presentations, but you don’t have to know Flash to benefit from its pizazz. That’s Flair’s biggest plus. And even at a pricey $199, it’s still cheaper than Flash, so it’s probably worth it to the right buyers. For the most part, Flair is straightforward to use. Its strength lies in its built-in video and audio recording capabilities, making it a reasonable option for e-learning products. It also converts PowerPoint files to Flash. The Edit User interface, shown in Figure E, is familiar enough to get you started. There’s a ton of online training and a ton of templates.

Figure E

You’ll use edit mode to create and modify slides.

For the price, you’d expect a free trial, but there isn’t one. You can download a demo, but they don’t make it easy.

Five top alternatives to PowerPoint | TechRepublic

Recover Deleted Songs Music In iPod, iPhone, iPad

by Nitish Singhal

If unfortunately you lost all your songs and playlist present on your computer hard disk due to viruses or disk crash, then today we are going to tell you about a tool named GizoRip which can easily retrieve your all tracks and playlist if you have saved them on your iPod or other devices from Apple like iPhone, iPad etc.

When you run this tool, at the main window there is a option to search for the iPods. Basically it will show only iPod but this tool works perfectly for any device from Apple. Alternatively, you can even select search for devices by finding this option under file.

Then this tool will take little time to search for you connected device and once it complete search, it will show all the music tracks present in your iPod or other device. You can copy these tracks and playlists directly to your hard drive and even you can simply import them to your iTunes Player. This tool even supports the latest version of iTunes.

To customize these settings, go to Options and then click on Preferences. There you will see option to import music directly to iTunes and also to ignore copy of all those files which already exists on your system. You can even Browse and select alternate path for export directory if you don’t want to make backup directly to iTunes.

Now once you are done with all the settings, simply click on Recover Music whose short-cut is given on main window or alternatively you can select this option from file also.

When you click on it, your music file restoring process will start instantly. You can see the progress of the restoring process from the bar given on top. Once the process is done, you can open the destination folder directly from the option given at bottom. Developer has also added option to Donate that is just upto your wish.

You make even discover the following .Net error while trying to run this tool. Just ignore that as it may be a little bug with the tool and it works perfectly after ignoring this error message.

The size of GizoRip is 1.70 Mb and as usual it will create a desktop shortcut which can be used to access this freeware. This tool is compatible with all the versions of Windows and has been tested successfully on Windows 7 Ultimate-32 bit edition.

Download GizoRip

Read more: http://www.technixupdate.com/recover-deleted-songs-music-in-ipod-iphone-ipad/#ixzz1jdcMbCFc

Recover Deleted Songs Music In iPod, iPhone, iPad

How to Recover that Photo, Picture or File You Deleted Accidentally

Have you ever accidentally deleted a photo on your camera, computer, USB drive, or anywhere else? What you might not know is that you can usually restore those pictures—even from your camera’s memory stick.

Windows tries to prevent you from making a big mistake by providing the Recycle Bin, where deleted files hang around for a while—but unfortunately it doesn’t work for external USB drives, USB flash drives, memory sticks, or mapped drives. Luckily there’s another way to recover deleted files.

Note: we originally wrote this article a year ago, but we’ve received this question so many times from readers, friends, and families that we’ve polished it up and are republishing it for everybody. So far, everybody has reported success!

Restore that File or Photo using Recuva

The first piece of software that you’ll want to try is called Recuva, and it’s extremely easy to use—just make sure when you are installing it, that you don’t accidentally install that stupid Yahoo! toolbar that nobody wants.

Now that you’ve installed the software, and avoided an awful toolbar installation, launch the Recuva wizard and let’s start through the process of recovering those pictures you shouldn’t have deleted.

The first step on the wizard page will let you tell Recuva to only search for a specific type of file, which can save a lot of time while searching, and make it easier to find what you are looking for.

Next you’ll need to specify where the file was, which will obviously be up to wherever you deleted it from. Since I deleted mine from my camera’s SD card, that’s where I’m looking for it.

The next page will ask you whether you want to do a Deep Scan. My recommendation is to not select this for the first scan, because usually the quick scan can find it. You can always go back and run a deep scan a second time.

And now, you’ll see all of the pictures deleted from your drive, memory stick, SD card, or wherever you searched. Looks like what happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas after all…

If there are a really large number of results, and you know exactly when the file was created or modified, you can switch to the advanced view, where you can sort by the last modified time. This can help speed up the process quite a bit, so you don’t have to look through quite as many files.

At this point, you can right-click on any filename, and choose to Recover it, and then save the files elsewhere on your drive. Awesome!

Download Recuva from piriform.com

Restore that File or Photo using DiskDigger

Update: it looks like since we first wrote about this, DiskDigger became shareware, which gives you a prompt for every file you save. It’s up to you whether you want to try it—best bet, try Recuva first. You could alternatively use the slightly older, but still totally free, portable version of the application from portablefreeware.com. Thanks, Mary!

If you don’t have any luck with Recuva, you can always try out DiskDigger, another excellent piece of software. I’ve tested both of these applications very thoroughly, and found that neither of them will always find the same files, so it’s best to have both of them in your toolkit.

Note that DiskDigger doesn’t require installation, making it a really great tool to throw on your PC repair Flash drive.

Start off by choosing the drive you want to recover from…

Now you can choose whether to do a deep scan, or a really deep scan. Just like with Recuva, you’ll probably want to select the first one first. I’ve also had much better luck with the regular scan, rather than the “dig deeper” one.

If you do choose the “dig deeper” one, you’ll be able to select exactly which types of files you are looking for, though again, you should use the regular scan first.

Once you’ve come up with the results, you can click on the items on the left-hand side, and see a preview on the right.

You can select one or more files, and choose to restore them. It’s pretty simple!

Good luck recovering your deleted files!

How to Recover that Photo, Picture or File You Deleted Accidentally - How-To Geek

PixBuilder Is An Easy-To-Use, Comprehensive Image Editing Tool

By Fawad

Last month, we covered a very comprehensive image editor named Artweaver Free, which has full support for layers, a wide variety of brushes and effect filters, enabling the users to edit images with great detail. In fact, we found it so useful that we compared it directly to Adobe Photoshop, but even though it was a great application, there was a catch; just like Adobe Photoshop, it was difficult to use for a newbie. So, we found PixBuilder to take care of that problem. It is an image editing application for digital photo editing, image processing and resizing. Read on to know more about PixBuilder.

The program allows you to perform color management functions, such as manage Brightness, Contrast and Color Balance. You can draw shapes and effects, or use the built-in drawing tool for creating shapes and applying effects to them. The application sports high quality effects to blur, sharpen and emboss your images. Just drag and drop the image over the main interface to add it to the application for editing. The image appears in the middle, image editing tools appear in the left panel, while the Zoom panel, Color panel, Tools panel, Undo panel and Channels panel appear on the right side of the image.

The Tools menu at the top allows you to choose different image editing tools, such as Pencil Brush, Eraser, Gradient, Clone Stamp, Crop, Text Tool etc.

The Effects menu has effects like Dithering, Quick Blur, Gaussian Blur, Sharpness, Emboss, Unsharp Mask etc. Customized Matrix can be used to further enhance the effects of an image.

Options such as Curves, to adjust the color curves of an image, allow you to easily edit the image with real-time preview of how the image will look, once you are done with applying an effect.

PixBuilder is a very comprehensive image editing application, and the full list of its functions can be seen on the product page. It works on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Download PixBuilder

PixBuilder Is An Easy-To-Use, Comprehensive Image Editing Tool

5 Ways to Shrink Your Outlook PST File Size
by DEBORAH SAVADRA

If you’ve been working with Microsoft Outlook for long, and particularly if you’re working in a Exchange Server environment (which set some pretty strict limits on file size), your Outlook .pst file may be getting too large. While you may not want to adhere to the fabled Inbox Zero standard, doing a little mail maintenance periodically will help Outlook run better. Here are five strategies for paring down your .pst file’s size.

Groom your Deleted Items folder

You’re really good about deleting Inbox messages you no longer need, right? But if they’re not being removed from your Deleted Items folder, they still count toward the total Outlook file size.

You can empty the Deleted Items folder one of two ways: manually or automatically. To do this manually, right-click on your Deleted Items folder, choose Empty Folder, and they’re gone.

http://lawyerist.com/cut-your-outlook-pst-file-size/

If you’re confident enough to say that, when you delete an e-mail, you never want to see it again, choose the automatic option. Go to the File tab and choose Options, then click Advanced. Under Outlook Start and Exit, you’ll see a checkbox next to “Empty Deleted Items folders when exiting Outlook.” Check that and click OK to save the setting.

Eliminate duplicate e-mails

Every time you forward an e-mail (particularly with attachments) to staff members, you are effectively doubling the size of storage necessary for that information, since by default a copy of that e-mail with its attachments now resides not only in your Inbox but in your Sent Items folder as well.

If there’s no longer a compelling reason to keep the forwarded version of that e-mail, go ahead and delete it out of your Sent Items folder. One trick to make this easier is to sort the e-mails in your Sent Items folder by recipient. It’s easy – just click on the To header in your Sent Items folder:

(You can simply instruct Outlook not to save forwarded messages in your Sent Items folder via a setting in the Mail/Save Messages section under Outlook Options accessible via the File tab. By default, however, any message you send, forwarded or not, is saved in the Sent Items folder.)

Save individual e-mails

Many Outlook users don’t realize they can save individual Outlook e-mails outside the Inbox in a variety of formats. Simply open the e-mail, go to the File tab, and click Save As.

You can save the e-mail as a plain text document, or you can save it in the Outlook Message format (.msg), which will preserve the formatting of the original e-mail.

Since any attachments to that message are saved in a temporary folder in Windows, it’s probably a good idea to right-click on any attachments and save them separately in the same folder on your hard drive (and make sure it’s backed up frequently).

Archive to Adobe Acrobat

If you’re ready to close a particular matter, and you got all the relevant e-mails sorted into a subfolder under your Inbox, you can use Adobe Acrobat to create an archive file that you can save your electronic records. The latest version of Adobe Acrobat include some pretty cool tools for archiving e-mail. In any version, the result is a conveniently searchable archive in a format virtually any computer can use.

Archive via Outlook

Once you’ve been using Outlook for multiple years, you may want to get into the habit of archiving your Inbox and Sent Items folders annually (or even more often if necessary).

It’s possible to automate this archiving, but since that tends to slow down the computer if you’re dealing with a large volume of e-mail, you may want to set this up manually and go to lunch. To start archiving a particular folder, go to the File tab, and under Cleanup Tools, choose Archive.

Choose the folder you want to archive (and be aware that all subfolders under that folder will be archived as well), choose the “older than” date, hit the Browse button if you want to specify a particular location and/or file name, then click OK. Depending on the volume of e-mail you’re processing, this is going to take a little while, so take a break from the computer.

Once the archive is complete, you have a separate .pst file with the older e-mails intact. If you ever need to access them again, simply go to the File tab, click Open, then choose Open Outlook Data File.

The “stitch in time” approach

If you can work some of these strategies into your regular routine, you’ll be far ahead of colleagues who suddenly can’t send or receive e-mail because their Outlook file has gotten too large. A little maintenance here and there will save you from a similar fate.