If you read some of Adobe’s advertising of Creative Suite 4 or 5, there’s a good chance you came across something called Dynamic Link. The idea is very cool: for example, they say you can take a timeline from Premiere Pro and place it in an After Effects composition as though it’s a movie clip, and edit it. So there’s no need to render in Premiere Pro and then render a second time in After Effects. Dynamic Link will also let you go in the other direction: take an After Effects comp and place it in a Premiere Pro timeline. Or use Sound Booth to edit audio tracks of Premiere Pro or After Effects without having to render out and re-placing.

But Adobe seems to have omitted a big, fat asterisk that says “Dynamic Link may not work.” The secret is that it works only if you bought the applications as a suite. And even if you bought Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and other Adobe applications in a suite, if you added Premiere Pro, After Effects or Sound Booth later, you can forget about Dynamic Link.

What’s especially irritating is that Adobe charges more for these applications separately. So you end up paying more to get less. My hope that they would fix this in CS5 went unrealized, and some product listings of CS5 now list Dynamic Link, as though it’s a product. Does that mean this is a feature, not a bug?

What if you want to learn Excel 2010, but didn’t have an Internet connection handy? I know, I know — but not everybody has a mobile Internet card. Or maybe your particular flight or train or mountaintop doesn’t have a good connection. Who you gonna call??

Lynda.com, that’s who. The DVD version of my Excel 2010 Essential Training just became available today. It’s the same course that you can take online, but the movies and data files are packaged on DVD. Check it out!

It’s a familiar story in Windows: you lay your page out in one orientation (portrait or landscape), but when you print, you discover that the print settings oriented the paper the opposite way. That’s wastes paper, ink and time. But that won’t happen in Excel 2010.

As in 2007, you go to the Page Layout tab to choose Portrait or Landscape from the orientation button.

Now in 2010 when you print (File/Print or Ctrl + P), the Print section of Backstage View automatically shows the printer is set to the correct orientation.

What’s also new is that if you change page orientation in the Page Layout tab, the Print dialog will automatically update. And if you change the orientation in the Print dialog, it will automatically update in the Page Layout tab.

This may sound like only a small improvement, but it helps a lot, especially if you often print large worksheets.