Changing Default Font and more in MS Office 2007

Microsoft recently released their newest, slickest, Vista-ready version of their office productivity suite, imaginatively dubbed "Office 2007." I got my hands on a copy recently, and I must say, it is very slick. Most of you have probably heard about this wonderful new ribbon menu system, so I won't belabor it here. But kudos to Microsoft for this cool idea. Time will tell if it's a useful cool idea.

But I do have some minor gripes with the new MS Word: the default font was set at 11 pt Calibri. Calibri is one of several of Microsoft's very pretty-looking "Longhorn Fonts" (which I had acquired two years ago). But Calibri is not a suitable font for essays... or any serious document for that matter. It's like Arial - it burns the eyes to read.

Another gripe I had with it was the paragraph spacing. For some reason, the default is set to add 10 points spacing between your paragraphs. I suppose that's fine for some types of documents, but I don't appreciate it as a default. So finally I moved my lazy ass to find out how to change it. It's very simple:







Just click on the icons that I circled, and up will pop a dialog box that will allow you to change the default font, etc. Hope that helps.

Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts

One of the shortcuts that I use all the time in Firefox is the "wp" feature. I type in "wp" (without the quotes) in the address bar followed by a space, and then followed by whatever query I want, and it automatically takes me to the Wikipedia page for the query (or a search page, if the query yielded no results).

But it turns out that there are a lot of these shortcuts -- and you can even configure your own! This website shows you the ones that are built in (such as dictionary, wikipedia, google, urban slang dictionary), and shows you how to add your own. My favorite is the ability to right click on any search engine text box and select "Add keyword for this search". You can go bonkers with it.

I just learn new things about firefox everyday.

Vista Background Rejects; Wallpaper Cycler

I stumbled across http://www.hamaddarwish.com/content/index_2.html; this is the website of the photographer hired by Microsoft to create all their pretty, pretty backgrounds in their newest operating system, Vista. Well, apparently a lot of his shots did not make the cut so he has kindly released them, in a very high resolution (1920x1200) format for our use and delight. And I must say, if these pictures are that great, how great are the ones going to be in Windows Vista? Or maybe Microsoft just doesn't know quality.



Anyways, I couldn't decide which one to set as my desktop background (there's a lot). And they're all very pretty. So I wondered, is there a program that allows me to cycle my wallpapers periodically, like a slideshow? And lo and behold, a Google search for "Wallpaper Cycler" yields this fruitful result: http://www.tucows.com/preview/291538(Wallpaper Cycler Lite) which does just the job.

So enjoy the combination of the two!