Sparklines – What’s that ?

I thought you’d say that. Well, let’s for argument sake say you did. In short, Sparklines are tiny diagrams or charts that you can insert into your worksheet at the end of a row or column to project trends or compare statistics. Each Sparkline is so small that it takes up no space at all. One Cell is all it takes, making it a brilliant visual help to monitor your numbers.

One usage that comes to mind is to monitor your sales progress during a month, week, quarter. Or, maybe if you have an Excel sheet to monitor your stock options, you can quickly see how they are doing suing small Sparklines.

Sparklines are located in the middle of the Insert Ribbon with three standard lines to choose from. Highlight the area you would like to monitor and choose your Sparkline of choice. I’m sure you’ll wonder, however you managed without.

Here’s How

This Quick-Tip works in both Excel 2007 and 2010 (and perhaps in some older versions as well). The only differences between the two is the different Office Buttons. In Excel 2007 the Office button is a round Windows button, where as in 2010 it’s a green tab.

1. In Excel 2010, Click the Green FILE-tab
   In Excel 2007, Click the Round Office Button
2. In Excel 2010, Choose Options in the bottom part of the left panel.
   In Excel 2007, Choose Excel options in the lower right corner of the Office File Menu
3. Locate the following heading in the right pane:
   “When creating new workbooks”
4. Change the value under: “Include this many sheets” from 3 to your desired number
5. Click OK

That’s it, and that’s that.

Image Resizer is an evolved product from the Image Resizer Powertoy Clone (which we have covered previously) by Brice Lambson, which allow the user to resize images with just a few clicks. Once it is installed, it sits comfortably in your right click context menu (only when you right click on images), and it is always ready for your resizing command.

How does it work?

Fairly simple. Just select all images, right click on them, and click Resize Pictures. Select your desired resolution (I suggest 1024×768 which is best balanced between quality and size for quick sharing, unless you want to share higher quality photos), click OK, and you are basically done.

However, you still have several advanced options to choose from if it’s needed.

Only shrink pictures – This option will only make the image smaller, not bigger. It means that if the original image is smaller than the resize scale, Image Resizer will not resize it.

Replace the originals – This option will directly resize the original image, without having the resized copy of it. Useful when you have to resize the images that are not meant to be kept in its original size.

What’s new since we last covered?

Currently the latest version of Image Resizer had stepped into Version 3 Preview 1, but don’t worry about the Preview 1 tag, it is fairly stable for normal usage (as claimed by the developer and tested by me.) .NET Framework 4 is required to run the new version though.

In this version, there are couple of new features implemented, and there are more promising features coming.

Resize image to new folder – This is a really interesting feature (the developer called it Black Magic). It will allows you to resize images into a newly created folder, which is particularly useful if the original images are meant to be kept. Create a new folder together with your bunch of images, select the images you want to resize, right-click-hold and drag-and-drop to the newly created folder, then select Resize pictures here. I really liked this feature a lot.

Progress bar – Compared to the older version, this one comes with a progress bar to show the resizing progress, which is really something good, since the older version tends to become unresponsive during the resizing process. No integration with the Windows 7 taskbar yet, but it’s a good start.

Metadata – The developer has rewritten the component for information preservation, therefore in this new version, all metadata from the original image will be kept. Good news for those who need every information from the original image.

Recycle replaced images – If you have selected the option Replace the originals before the resizing, all the replaced images will be transfer to Recycle Bin to avoid any complicated issue caused by the replacement. Just clean the Recycle Bin if the resized one is working well.

More features coming – Click on the Advance Settings, you can see the upcoming features, including JPEG quality level adjustment, user-defined default size, user-defined filename format, and selective metadata stripping. Good stuffs.

Performance

You might want to know how it performs in a bulk image resize. I did a simple test and the results will vary for everyone since it depends on the performance of your CPU, HDD etc., but I think it will be a good reference for those who wanted to know.

This test is performed on the PC equipped with AMD Athlon 7750 Dual-Core Processor (2.7GHz), 4GB DDR2 RAM, and SATA HDD 7200rpm. Image Resizer 3 Preview 1 and 130 images were resized to perform this simple test. After the test, I found that all 130 images are resized to 1024×768 in 1 minutes 45 seconds, which is pretty good in my opinion. Below is the comparison of the size before and after resizing:

Original: Average 2MB, 130 images, Total 293MB

Resized: Average 180KB, 130 images, Total 21.3MB

For quick sharing, the reduction of the total size from 293MB to 21.3MB is definitely much appreciated. All thanks to the Fant resampling algorithm, Image Resizer 3 is now able to produce small size, but higher quality output than the conventional JPEG compression algorithms.

If you prefer a official stable version of Image Resizer, you still can get the latest 2.1 stable, although I strongly recommended to get the version 3 since it is quite stable as well.

Download Image Resizer 3 Preview 1

Download Image Resizer 3 Preview 1 (Download .NET Framework 4 – Needed for v.3)

Download Image Resizer 2.1

Download Image Resizer 2.1

Thanks to freewaregenius for pointing these out to us.

And the newcomers are…

WinX DVD Author

Our good old friends over at Digiarity has since last decided to release their DVD authoring software as Freeware. This suite does not only convert any movie to DVD, but also allow you to author or re-pack a DVD with themes, chapters and everything you’d expect from a payware program.

As always, Digiarity promises high-quality and High-Speed – and in my opinion, they do deliver.

With step-by-step wizard built-in, even novice can easily convert and burn MKV, M2TS, M4V, MP4, FLV, MPEG, MOV, RM, RMVB, H.264, AVI to DVD, etc. Equipped with fast and powerful decode encoder engine, this free DVD burner software takes less than one hour to create a full 4.3 G high quality DVD, while delivering 100% excellent audio and video effects.

Download WinX DVD Author

Chasys Draw IES

This program is soon to be one of my favourite programs. On a daily basis, when working with high-quality graphics, I turn to the master of all; Photoshop. The problem is that Photoshop is much too heavy for my netbook, which I carry with me all over. Chasys Draw IES is a suite of image editing tools featuring a powerful bitmap editor that supports Photoshop style layers and plugins, giving me a lightweight program with the powerful functionality of which I have come to expect and need.

The whole suite is UAC aware and is designed to take advantage of multi-core processors, touch-screens and pen-input devices.

Expect to see a full review on this later

Download Chasys Draw IES

BufferZone PRO

I’ve earlier told you about Sandbox programs like Sandboxie and TimeFreeze. The BufferZone Pro is the ’PRO’ version of Trustware’s virtualization/sandboxing program. As with any Sandboxing program, it works by isolating running processes from the rest of the system, making it virtually impossible for the running programs to make changes to your system.

BufferZone Pro does NOT support 64-bit architecture, but they claim to introduce this feature sometime in 2011.

Download BufferZone Pro

Download BufferZone Pro

Windows Guides’ Rating	User Rating	Compatible with	System
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Awesome Duplicate Photofinder is a great freeware program designed to help you find those duplicate stored photos on your hard-drive.

But Awesome Duplicate Photofinder (say that fast five times in a row) does more. It even help you look for similar looking photos, using a comparison routine you would expect to find in an expensive commercial solution.

Simple and fast

Using  Awesome Duplicate Photofinder is very easy. Add the folders to search and wait for the program to show you the results. Most times Awesome Duplicate Photofinder comes out right, but sometimes pictures taken seconds apart (in succession) will be tagged as duplicates.

Similar images

The feature that impresses me most is the “similarity feature”, which not only pick images that look alike (or similar) but it also shows you a percentage score to help you decide how similar the images are.

Version 1

Awesome Duplicate Photofinder is a new program and I believe we will see many improvements as it gets further developed. That being said, the lean interface, with its “side-by-side” presentation of the results leaves very little to be improved.

If you have ideas I am sure the developer will appreciate your opinion.

Download it!

Download Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder

One-Click Conversion to Device and Output Format

As before you can predefine  custom settings to suit your needs, but now PhotoMagician also comes with preset settings for the most common devices out there. But the most interesting new functionality is Format to Format Settings.

Set Default Conversion Rules for different formats.

PhotoMagician now let you decide which format get converted to which format. You can set Tiff to JPEG, PSD to PNG and so on. This is especially useful if your camera save photos in RAW format or its equals; DDS, PCX, PSD, TARGA, WBMP and WMF.

The new list of predefined  formats now includes these devices:

• DVD (PAL)
• High Definition TV (HD 720)
• High Definition TV (HD 1080)
• iPhone / iTouch
• iPod (Photo)
• iPod (Video)
• iPod Nano (1G / 2G)
• iPod Nano (3G / 4G / 5G)
• Nintendo DS / DSi / DSi XL
• Sony PSP / PSP Go (16S)
• Sony PSP / PSP Go (4:3)
• Microsoft Zune
• Microsoft Zune HD (4:3)
• Microsoft Zune HD (16:9)
• Custom Width & Height
• No Change (Maintain Original Size)
• WIDTH Only (Maintain aspect Ratio)
• HEIGHT Only (Maintain aspect Ratio)
• iPhone 4

Download PhotoMagician

In this part, I will be covering some software that are specifically written to assist computer users in reducing paper wastage, as well as help in saving printing inks (they are expensive!) The software covered are mixed with free and commercial versions, and I list out the pros and cons for each software, and give some recommendations for those who are looking at a free solution. There is one common characteristic for all these software: all of them will be installed as a virtual printer in your operating system to streamline the printing process. So let’s begin with the first printing software:

GreenPrint (Free and Commercial)

Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, GreenPrint offers three versions of their printing software which aimed to save paper, ink and trees. GreenPrint World, which is a free version specifically for home users only, and includes all the basic GreenPrint features (save as PDF, remove images, texts, and pages etc.), with a price of unobtrusive advertisements in the user interface. No luck for MAC OSX users, the free World Edition only supported Windows XP/Vista/7, both 32-bit and 64-bit. There is another version, namely GreenPrint Home Premium priced at $19, is a better featured GreenPrint (faster preview, no advertisements etc.), which supports Mac OSX. However, I personally think that the free version is quite adequate for most of the users, except that you can’t really bear with the advertisements embedded in the user interface.

The interface of GreenPrint is quite self-explanatory, where all the functions available to the user are well-defined with the icons. There are also some counters tracking all the costs and savings that the user has made using the software. Click on the counters at the bottom bar will lead you to the GreenPrint Report, which is an interface showing a detailed statistics on your printing behavior. Below shown the interface of Green Print:

Pros/Cons

• Free with advertisements, only supported Microsoft Windows (World Edition)
• Better version available at $19 with advertisements (Home Premium)
• Options to remove images, texts, and pages
• Save as PDF option
• No multi-pages per sheet option
• Have an option to plant a tree for $1

iPrint (Free)

A completely free solution provided by Inzone Software Limited, iPrint is an eco-friendly printing utility that can help computer users to save cost in printing, which can be used either at home or for business purposes. Besides being a free forever software, it has some nice features equipped with it as well – it has multiple pages per sheet options (2-in-1 and 4-in-1), plus it can collect all the printing jobs in one interface, which is useful for batch printing. Though natively iPrint doesn’t come with a PDF creation feature, but it can be easily solved by installing a PDF printer such as PrimoPDF.

Similar to GreenPrint, iPrint has a simple interface with self-explanatory icons. In the software interface, the user is able to remove unwanted pages by just double click on them, however there is no option to remove images or texts from the document, unlike in GreenPrint. Nevertheless, iPrint does have a simple counter for the savings made by the user.

Pros/Cons

• Free forever
• Option to remove pages
• Multiple pages per sheet option (2-in-1 and 4-in-1)
• Collect print jobs within one interface
• No save as PDF option
• No options to remove images and texts

PriPrinter (Commercial)

I must say that PriPrinter is one of the eco-friendly printing software that have the most complete features, not to mention the nice GUI (Ribbon UI), however, they do not have a free version. Standard edition cost you about $34.95, which does not contain PDF creation and text editing features. The complete Professional Edition PriPrinter is at $87.95, which might be worthy for those who related in the printing industry, but it is definitely an undesired price tag for a normal computer users. Nevertheless, they do provide a free trial of both versions without time limit, with small banner printed on each page as a trade-off, which I personally feel that it is quite acceptable for personal usage (check the screenshot below, notice the red color small banner).

Feature wise, Pelikan Software KFT’s PriPrinter is quite unbeatable. Besides using the Ribbon UI, it has a high quality rendering engine which allows the user to perform print preview in many ways, including in 3D mode (which give you an idea how does the printing look like in the real life). It also has numerous options for the page layout and printing mode for the user to choose during a printing job, which allows a high flexibility printing pattern. With the Professional Edition, you can even edit the content on the fly (highlight, black out, correction), which is definitely a good feature.

Pros/Cons

• Highly customizable printing job
• Fully featured
• Ribbon UI
• 3D preview mode
• Storable printing history
• Unlimited free trial with small printed banner
• No free version

FinePrint (Commercial)

Besides PriPrinter, FinePrint is another alternative but cheaper version which contains numerous of features for printing jobs.  At a price of $49.95 for a single license, you get pretty much all the necessary functions for smart printing, including multiple pages per sheet, remove graphics (which can be remove individually), remove pages, double-sided, content editing (delete, highlight, redact). I have been using FinePrint for quite some time, and one of the feature I liked the most is the printer setting wizard. This wizard will run a series of printing tests for your printer to determine the settings, especially on duplex printing settings, which helps a lot if you always deal with double-sided printing using a non-auto duplex printer. FinePrint can also archive the printing jobs, so if you need a identical copies of the printed materials in the future, you can just open the archived printing job and you are ready to print it again.

Unlike PriPrinter, FinePrint has a much simpler interface, and most of the functions are accessible from the user interface, but definitely not as customizable as in PriPrinter. However,it is not surprising that some computer users would prefer a simpler interface rather than a complicated one, so FinePrint is a good choice for them. Although it is a commercial software, but it does offer a free trial without time limit, and similarly, the print out will have small banner of FinePrint.

Pros/Cons

• All necessary features are included
• Simpler user interface
• Printer setting wizard
• Storable printing job
• No Save as PDF option
• Unlimited free trial with small printed banner
• No free version

Which is the best at the cost of zero?

All software introduced above have their own pros and cons, and at the cost of nil, it really depends whether the user is able to bear the small banner in the trial version. If you can, get yourself PriPrinter if you looking for highly customizable printing job, or go for FinePrint if you prefer a simpler and easy-to-access interface. Of course, if you do mind about the small banner and would like to have a clean printing from the software, go for both GreenPrint World Edition and iPrint. The only setback is that you can’t have both content editing (offered by GreenPrint) and multiple pages per sheet (offered by iPrint) work together. I have tried to go for a bypass trick, which I first edit the content of the document in GreenPrint, and then transfer the printing job to the iPrint (and vice versa), but the printing doesn’t seems usable (texts rendering goes haywire).

Besides the four software above, there are another two software that I would like to introduce as a companion for them.

Best companion

PrimoPDF

Being the world 1st free PDF creator (as claimed by them), PrimoPDF is a PDF creator which can be installed as a complement to those software that not having PDF creation feature, such as iPrint and FinePrint. I have been using it to generate PDF for quite some time, and it rarely fails me, so I strongly recommended PrimoPDF for PDF creation task in Microsoft Windows.

To download PrimoPDF, head to their official page and get it installed in your Windows XP/Vista/7.

iReader (Firefox and Google Chrome only)

Besides the printing software, it will be the best if the content of the printing can be filtered before sending them for the printing job, especially web content. While some of the websites do have a printer-friendly option, but somehow it doesn’t available for most of the websites containing great articles. With iReader, those unnecessary elements in the webpage (banners, website header, background etc.) are all removed and a clean article is able to be generated from a full-featured website. Using our own website and my article as an example, you can see the difference before and after using the iReader for content filtering. After the filtering (or clutter-free processing), you can print it right away using the software that I have introduced above, either on the paper or into digital format. There is one minor problem with this option though: the separation between pages might cut a line of texts or image into half since the article is rendered in a clutter-free and continuous manner, but I believe it doesn’t cause much problem in most cases.

^{Before using iReader}

^{After using iReader}

If you are using Mozilla Firefox, proceed to their official add-ons site for iReader. Else, if you are using Google Chrome, it is available in Google Chrome Extensions gallery.

Conclusion

With some assistance from the software and a little bit of effort from the computer users, I believe that paper wastage can be reduced to a very low level. Hopefully all the software covered in this article are able to help all the readers in reducing paper wastage due to unnecessary/mistaken printing. Don’t hesitate to share this article to your friends/relatives or anyone that involved with tons of printing everyday; it does not only save the printing cost, but it does reduce paper wastage and save the tree, and indirectly save the environment from further devastation. If you have any comments/suggestions to this article, don’t hesitate to let us know.

This article is a continuity of the Print Smart to Reduce Wasted Paper – Part 1 [How To].

FindThatFont 1.0 – Organizing made simple 

The main idea behind FindThatFont is to make is easy to find that very font you need for your design. This application let you create and set categories for each font on your system. You can then sort your fonts accordingly. However FindThatFont does only read fonts installed in the Windows Font Folder, but the developer promise to add functions from other font management programs, like Enable / Disable fonts from different locations.

Interesting idea

FindThatFont! offers an extension manager and allows developers to modify or extend the program with endless many features. So far there is only one extension available, but if the developer gets this right I’m sure many more will follow.

AMP Font Viewer – Powerful yet Easy

AMP Font Viewer comes packed with a great deal of functionality. In addition to preview fonts you can enable/disable fonts from various locations. It has a built in search function that allows you to search for partial names – keeping you from scrolling through the entire font-list. Another Feature which I love, is the ability to temporarily enable a font. This allows you to use a font on a certain job, without having to disabling it afterwards. A great function for those fonts you only use now and then. AMP Font also offers several options for managing and organizing fonts in categories.

What caught my eye

The “Scratchpad area” which is a small Notebook-like window where you can play around with your fonts to see how it behaves in different settings.

NexusFont – Going Portable

NexusFont might just be my new favorite. As you know I’m a graphics Designer and I have tons of fonts at my disposal. One of the things I look for in a powerful Font Manager is the ability to temporarily enable fonts. NexusFont goes beyond that. The usual functions aside, NexusFont let you search for and remove or rename duplicate fonts. It has an automatic enabling function that makes all listed fonts in NexusFont available to other programs.

What really caught my eye

It’s Portable! NexusFont can be installed on your USB Flash Drive. If you travel a lot, you can keep all your fonts on the flash drive, boot NexusFont on any computer and you’re all set. Never be without your fonts ever again.

Downloads

FindThatFont

AMP Font

NexusFont

As a hobbyist photographer, I only bring my camera along when there is an event/gathering/photography session. However, there are always times when an interesting scene or idea that’s worth a capture comes across my mind but the camera isn’t with me at that moment, and I have to rely on my mobile phone’s camera feature. While the camera on the phone isn’t that bad (upcoming Nokia N8 has a 12 Megapixels sensor), one of the big disadvantages for most of the phone’s camera is their poor light sensor (to compensate the small size of the phone), and under low light conditions, some of the photos taken have to deal with noise. In order to remove those noises to yield higher quality shots, post-processing is needed, and this is where Imagenomic Noiseware comes into play.

Clear the Noise for Me Please!

Imagenomic Noiseware is offered in three editions, namely the Community Edition (Free), Standard and Professional Edition (Paid version, free 15 days trial is available). Of course the paid edition consists of a number of nice features, but if you are looking for a simple program to do the de-noise job and have images in JPEG format, the free Imagenomic Noiseware Community Edition is sufficient for you (at least for me.) Noiseware Community Edition has a very simple and intuitive interface (screenshot below), and it’s quite impressive to have the fully customizable noise filter settings in the software, considering the software is being offered for free.

Interface of Imagenomic Noiseware Community Edition

To remove the photo noise, just drag-and-drop the photo you desired into the software, and press the red ‘Go’ button after you have the noise filter configured to your desired settings (or you can try their default profile first if you have no idea on the configuration). Once the de-noise process is done, you will notice that the noise in the photo has been suppressed.  One of the features in Noiseware Community Edition I liked the most is the ability to compare pre and post-processing effects by just clicking on the photo; you are able to see the difference between them immediately. You might find that there is a slight drop in the image quality in term of sharpness and clarity, but a post-processing in image editing software should be able to restore the desired quality.

Demonstration

So how good is the noise filtering by Noiseware? Do check out the example that I produced myself, and I would say it is quite well done, what do you think?:

Before and after filtering

Although the batch process feature has been reserved for the paid edition of Noiseware, I believe that the Community Edition is quite adequate for most of the hobbyist photographers (unless every photo you have taken are full of noise which is a headache), and it is certainly a (free) gift for those who prefer to take photos with their camera phone and wanted the best quality out from the camera. Check out their comparison for the three different editions if you wanted to have more from the software, or you might prefer a Adobe photoshop plug-in version of Noiseware.

Do you have any other software that does the similar (or better job) than Imagenomic Noiseware? Or you have some tips for us on reducing noises in photos? Don’t hesitate to voice out at the comment area or write to us. We would like to hear them. Until then, enjoy your noise-less photos!

Download Imagenomic Noiseware(TM)

Download Imagenomic Noiseware(TM)

This is where Gyazo comes in.  Gyazo is a one trick pony but does the trick well.  All you have to do is pin the shortcut to your taskbar or have a desktop icon available, click the icon grab the part of the screen you wish to share and it’s immediately uploaded to the Gyazo server and displayed in your browser where you can instantly share with Twitter, Tumblr & Flickr.  It also automatically copies the image URL to your clipboard for even better efficiency!

Alternatively, you can hold shift whilst you drag and drop an image onto your desktop icon and it’ll upload too!

Currently there’s no editing tools available but hopefully a basic set will emerge in the near future.

Download Gyazo

Works for Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 (x86 & x64)