If you’re a spreadsheet jockey, but you’re not keen on Excel’s default settings, reader Curare details how to set up a custom Excel template so the data-wrangling app always uses the workspace you prefer.
As excited as some of us still are about Google Wave (hell, two of us wrote a book), Wave’s biggest problem remains: “What would I use it for?” With the app’s new wave templates, Google wants to guide you toward answers.
Keeping track of expenses on the road is always fiddly. Getting the discipline to enter the relevant information on your PC is something you’ll need to work on yourself, but if your office doesn’t already mandate an expense system, this Excel template will help simplify the process.
Budding poets and aspiring academics have a common need — tracking where they’ve sent written work and whether it’s been accepted. One easy solution to that problem is to use a specifically designed tracking document.
Reader Stephen writes in with an excellent, time-saving tip: you can create Outlook templates for frequently-used topics, and then pin them to the taskbar to make them easy to access.
Balancing work, family life, personal time and more can be quite a tricky task compared to simply managing your time and tasks in the workplace. Use this handy worksheet to work on your life balance.
Looking to re-arrange the stuff of your house or plan a dream room? Floorplanner is a web-based tool for planning rooms and furniture layouts using a simple but powerful editor. We originally reviewed Floorplanner in 2007, but since then they’ve introduced some helpful new features. We originally dug it because of the easy drag-and-drop interface and the extensive library of furniture, fixtures, plants and more are still there. One of the principle reader complaints back then was the lack of 3D planning, but you can now plan in both 2D and 3D, switching between the views for a long view of proportion and layout. The free demo on their site doesn’t allow you to save, but does give you a feel for the tools and layout—though you might be tempted to sign up, after a little Sims-style rearrangement. Or, you know, they put that PrtSc key on up there on your keyboard for a reason. Floorplanner has a free and premium tier; the limitation on the free plan is one house or apartment floor plan. If you upgrade to Floorplanner PLUS for $US27.50 a year, you can create up to five home plans.
Floor Planner [via GeekSugar]If you’re a big fan of the templates at D*I*Y Planner, and we certainly are, you’ll be thrilled to know they have released a cross-platform program for generating your own templates. The application, at least the Windows version I tested, is stand alone and portable. It is currently limited to generating month/week/day appointment templates but will have other D*I*Y Planner templates like notes and such included in future releases. Automatic scaling to various US and international paper sizes is included, as well as the ability to tweak a host of smaller things like line weight. Completed templates are exported as a PDF file. Dynamic Templates is open source and cross-platform. Dynamic Templates [D*I*Y Planner]
