I just installed the Add-to-Any plug-in for WordPress. If you want to be notified any time there’s a new post here, notice the Subscribe button on the right side of the page. Use it to subscribe by e-mail or RSS, using any service you can think of except carrier pigeon (that comes in a future version if I can stop my cat from chasing the pigeons). E-mail subscriptions are piped through FeedBlitz, and no, I will not spam you or provide your address to anyone who will.

There’s a cool Firefox add-in that puts rulers and guides in the browser window, so you can measure things just like in Photoshop, Flash, Quark and most other graphics applications. The add-in is called foxGuide and you can download and install it from Mozilla here. Just be aware that it’s currently a beta release. Like most other add-ins, it’s free, and the developers don’t even seem to be asking for donations. I’m running foxGuide in Firefox 4 beta 9 without a problem.

Once foxGuide is installed, activate it from the pop-up menu when right-clicking the screen:

You can then drag as many horizontal and vertical guidelines on the screen as you want. Remove one at a time by dragging it off the screen, or remove them all by right-clicking and choosing Reset Guides. Or just refresh the browser.

The only minor glitch is that because the rulers lie on top of the screen, they take up a small amount of space (rather than pushing the screen away), so if you want to measure something right at the edge it can take some fiddling. But that isn’t terrible; just make the rulers transparent to see what’s behind them. You probably also want to fix the rulers in place, otherwise they’ll scroll out of view when you scroll the page. You control the preferences with a small control panel in the lower, right corner of the screen.

The 2003 and 2007 versions of Outlook had a great feature called the Organizer. Sitting in a small, pop-up strip above the list of e-mails, you could quickly apply custom colors or fonts to messages based on specific criteria, such as who sent it or words the subject line contained. It was a great feature, and it took just a few clicks to use.

For what reason I don’t know, in Outlook 2010 Microsoft decided not only to bury this feature where you’ll never find it, but to make it less intuitive to use once you do. So I’ll make it easier for you.

Here is how it works:

1. Click the View tab, and in the Current View group on the left side, click View Settings.
   
2. That displays the Advanced View Settings dialog, which might look familiar from the older versions of Outlook. Click the Conditional Formatting button.
3. The window that appears already contains some default rules. Click the Add button to create your own.
4. Assign a meaningful name — something that tells you what you’re highlighting.
5. Click the Font button. In the dialog box that appears, choose a format for how you want the message header (to, from, subject, etc.) to appear. This will not affect the body of messages.
   
6. Click OK.
7. Now click the Condition button to choose which messages to format. In this example, I want Outlook to find messages with a subject line of “latest releases from lynda.com”.
   
8. Or instead, you could choose to format messages sent by Joe Smith or messages that contain the word “doohickey” in the body. If you specify more than one condition, all of the conditions must be true for a message to be highlighted (i.e. conditions have an and relationship). Click OK.
9. The Conditional Formatting dialog should now display the name of your rule and what the header format will look like.
   
10. Click OK, then click OK again to close the dialogs.
11. Now look at your inbox. All messages with the condition(s) you chose have your formatting.
    
12. If you later decide you don’t want to highlight these messages, return to the Conditional Formatting dialog. Temporarily disable the rule by removing the check next it or remove the rule permanently by selecting it and clicking the Delete button.
    

This is also how you can go back to change the formatting.

Microsoft SharePoint and Office 2010 work and play together very well. In fact, it could be hard to tell that your files are on a secure web server, rather than on your own hard drive. Here is a quick tutorial showing several ways of saving, opening and moving files around using Office and SharePoint 2010.

Happy new year! Let me start off 2011 by giving you a handy tip I’m sure you’ll like. Something that’s useful and even kind of fun: There are plenty of ways to capture part of your screen, but they usually involve messing around with dialog boxes every time or cropping out areas you don’t want, or they involve spending money on a utility. But there’s a good chance you have a better way already but don’t know it, yet.

I’m not talking about the Snipping tool in Windows 7 or the old Print Screen key. What you can do instead is press a keyboard shortcut that lets you select any rectangular area on your screen and have that selection in your clipboard. You can then paste that selection into almost any document, as I’ve done below.

What makes this work is Microsoft OneNote. If you have any edition of Microsoft Office 2010 or the Home or Enterprise edition of Office 2007, it means you have OneNote. Here’s how you set it up (you have to do this only once):

1. Start up OneNote (Select Start/All Programs/Microsoft Office/OneNote 2010 or click the Start button and search for OneNote).
2. Click the File tab, select Options, then click the Display category on the left.
3. Check the option for “Place OneNote icon in the notification area….”. If you have Office 2010, also check the option at the bottom labeled “Disable screen clipping notifications”.
   
4. Click OK.
5. If you’re using Office 2007, you need to do one more step (ignore this step if you have 2010). Look at the Notification area of your taskbar (lower-right corner of your screen, near the clock). You should see a OneNote icon that looks like this: . (You might have to click the small Up arrow to see it.) Click the icon and from the pop-up menu, select Options/Screen Clipping Defaults. Select Copy to Clipboard Only.

Now you can use it:

1. On your keyboard, press  + S. The mouse pointer will become a cross hair and the screen will gray out.
2. Now click-and-drag the cross hair over an area of your screen.
   
3. When you release the mouse button, the screen will return to normal.
4. Open up almost any program — Word, Excel, a new Outlook e-mail, a OneNote page, a Photoshop or Illustrator document — and paste (Ctrl + V). You’ll see your screen capture.