Published June 4th, 2007
in geospatial.
My previous post mentions CAD files. Not everyone has a couple of thousand spare dollars to pick up industry standard CAD applications. Not everybody needs expensive software, either.
Cumulate Draw is probably more of a Visio replacement than a CAD replacement. It’s certainly not as powerful as, say, Autodesk Architectural Desktop. But if you don’t need dimensions accurate to an eighth of an inch and just want to sketch a quick floor plan, Cumulate Draw might suit your needs. It is free and available online. Your work can be exported to several different formats, including JPEG, PNG, and SVG.
Here is a quick office layout I created in Cumulate Draw. Click on the thumbnail to view the full-sized image.
Popularity: 66% [?]
Published May 15th, 2007
in technology.
Rick Broida over at Lifehacker has written a nice how-to on making Microsoft Word less annoying. The comments seem to reinforce the most intriguing tip I saw: Ditch Word altogether.
Heh. We do use Microsoft Office at the office, but I think I will take the plunge and try out the Open Office suite at home.
Here’s a bonus tip not included in Broida’s post.
Turn off Reading Layout. One of the first things I noticed when I began using Office 2003 was the Reading Layout “feature”. When opening Word documents as email attachments, Word 2003 by default would open the document in Reading Layout. This was supposed to make documents easier to scan through but the first thing I’d do would be click the Close button and view the document in another Layout mode.
Here’s how to turn off Reading Layout:
- Click the “Tools” menu and choose “Options”.
- When the “Options” multi-tabbed dialog box appears, click “General”.
- Uncheck “Allow starting in Reading Layout”.
- Click “OK” to close the dialog box.
Popularity: 36% [?]
My previous post mentions CAD files. Not everyone has a couple of thousand spare dollars to pick up industry standard CAD applications. Not everybody needs expensive software, either.