Often our network locations at work are not as private as we think we are.  For example, staff in IT departments often have quite wide ranging access rights which will include your files!  This is how to keep those documents secret in Word 2007:

With your document open, go to the Office Home button:

Select Save As and select the desired save option.  You will then get the Save dialogue box.

Click on the Tools button at the bottom left, and then choose General Options.

Enter a password in the desired field.  Password to Open means that people will have to enter the password before they can see the document, Password to Modify means that people can open it but need to enter the password to make changes.  You can use either of these or both together. 

Using Password to Open will give the maximum encryption of the file.  Password to Modify offers no encryption.

Click on OK.

You will be asked to retype the passwords to confirm them.  Do this and click on OK.

You may be asked if you want to replace the existing document, in which case click Yes.

Make sure you keep the password safe, but don’t forget it.  If you are unable to remember the password you will not be able to access the document, and neither your ICT Department or Microsoft will be able to help you.

To remove password protection just follow the instructions above, remove the password(s) leaving the fields empty and click on OK.

I enjoy looking for inspirational quotes for these posts.  I feel sort of, well, inspired!!  I hope you enjoy these I found this week.

The less you speak, the more you will hear.
Alexander Solshenitsen

No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.
Aesop

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.
Andrew Carnegie

Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust and hostility to evaporate.
Albert Schweitzer

You can make more friends in two months by becoming really interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. Which is just another way of saying that the way to make a friend is to be one.
Dale Carnegie

I make progress by having people around who are smarter than I am and listening to them. And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.
Henry J. Kaiser

The people with whom you work reflect your own attitude. If you are suspicious, unfriendly and condescending, you will find these unlovely traits echoed all about you. But if you are on your best behavior, you will bring out the best in the persons with whom you are going to spend most of your working hours.
Beatrice Vincent

People who fight fire with fire usually end up with ashes.
Abigail Van Buren

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They're either speaking or preparing to speak. They're filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people's lives.
Stephen Covey

If you want to please people who are mistaken, you can't simply tell the truth. You're always going to have to add some sort of padding to protect their misconceptions from bumping against reality.
Paul Graham

I few images that I spotted on the web.  Enjoy.

I was asked a question recently that I thought would be helpful to answer here.  The question is, how do you repair or rejuvenate an image that is pixilated when you put it into Word.

We, sadly, the answer is that there is not a lot you can do. I have written about this here in more detail, bu this is a summary.  Images come in varying degrees of quality, some (lower quality) look wonderful on screen but print badly, others look great until you enlarge them, when you start to see jagged edges or pixilation.  The only way to reduce pixilation in an image is to reduce the size of it so that the pixel edges are no longer visible to the naked eye.  Unfortunately, for images downloaded from the internet, these images are often very small to start with.  Web designers deliberately make them small so that web pages load more quickly.

To get a better quality image you need to get hold of the image at higher resolution.  This means that it must have more dpi (dots per inch) for images that you want to print.  Note that dpi and ppi (pixels per inch) are not the same thing, but they are near enough to simplify my explanation.

You could contact the company/individual that owns the website you got it from and ask if they have a high resolution copy.  This is quite reasonable, especially if you are working with them on a project or you are promoting their products/services.  If the site is  your own company site, then someone within the company should have print quality images.  Try the IT department, the press office or marketing department.  I managed to get some lovely professional images, free to use, from our own press office.

However,  you may not wish to contact the owner of the website that you are taking downloading images from.  Other alternatives for getting images are buying stock images which I wrote about here and here, and taking your own photos.  Sometimes it's just easier to get the camera and go down and take the photo yourself!!  Maybe you can talk the boss into paying for a photography course.  Worked for me!

Happy snapping.

As promised, today I am going to sign up for an image hosting provider.  These are the steps for signing up to Photobucket:

Go to http://photobucket.com

On the top right you will see the words "Sign Up".  Click on these words

Complete the form on the next screen.

On the next screen click on Upload Now to upload images.

At the following screen the default settings are Upload from My computer.  To do this click on the green button which says 'Select photos and videos'.

Find your image file and click on Open in the dialogue box.  You will be given an opportunity to add a title and description.

The image is automatically put into an album labelled with your user name.  You can add further albums if you wish.

Experiment with the buttons in the blue bar at the top.

Note that with this hoster you cannot download the images once they are uploaded, so this would not be a good vehicle for sharing image files.  Google's Picassa would be a better choice if you require this service.

I have checked, and Photobucket do allow you to link to a site to sell items, unlike Flikr.

I came across a list of photo sharing websites I thought I would share with you (see link at the end).  This came about because I was wanting to use Flikr to host some photos that I was linking to from our staff intranet to sell a couple of household items.  Flikr said that this was 'commercial' and not allowed, so I went in search of alternatives. This is a list of things you might want to consider before you sign up to a site:

Anyway, here is the link to a list of photo sharing sites and their features and limitations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photo_sharing_websites

I am using Picassa for my family photos and am happy with it.  It has a smooth uploading system with iPhoto on my Apple Mac too, which makes it even easier.  You can download the image editing software for free as well.

In my next post I will pick one service and take you through the joining and uploading process.

I hope you enjoyed your Christmas and New Year.  I'm back to it and making plans for the coming year.

As I've commented on in previous posts, for many the next few months are going to be difficult ones, particularly those whose work involves the public sector.  I spoke to someone recently who said to me, I just live for today and try not to think about what is going to happen next month or next year.  I can understand how this can be more comforting in the short term, but this ostrich-like behaviour doesn't help you in the future. 

Yes, it may be that you cannot change the decisions made by management at the organisation that you work at, but you can change YOUR plans and decisions based on the intelligence that you have.  I have put links to my previous posts on this subject a the bottom of this post.  Have a re-read and see if any of my suggestions help at all.  Having some sort of plan will, at the very least, help you think beyond your current problems.  It may also help you to realise that, whatever happens, you will survive, and you will.  

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I'm busy with Christmas and New Year plans so this is the last post I'll make this year. Thanks to everyone who visited and gave feedback via email.  I looked around for some good Christmas cards to post but came across these videos instead.  Hope you like them.

I posted some desk exercises some time ago, but here are some very useful ones that act as a reminder to keep doing them:

Following on from my post on working from home last week, I got a couple of comments and questions about the issue of tax and insurance.

If you are based in your company's premises and just taking work home occasionally then you do not need to be concerned.  If however you have clients visiting your home, or you are running a business from home you need to check with your insurance company to make sure you are not invalidating your insurance.

You should continue to use your office space as your home to avoid the risk of capital gains tax should you sell the property.  If you rent you should check with your landlord to see if there are any issues.

If anyone can think of other issues let me know and I'll look into it.