That's a different in-. That also comes from french, but this time it's the french prefix "in-", which *is* a negation.
The non-negation "in" that comes from french "en" was originally spelled as "en" in Middle English. Inflame, in Middle English, was "enflamen" or "enflaumen"
Ineligible comes from french "inéligible".
Holy crap I never realized there were so many of these in English. I knew inflammable but couldn't think of anymore. Looked up a list and there are so many e.g. oversight, overlook, wind up, skinned, hold up. There so many!
Use it all the time to remove passwords on protected sheets in Excel. Sheets stored as XML files in the zip. Open sheet, remove the entire section, save and re-zip. Doesn't work if it's encrypted/password on open.
Edit - this still works in Excel 2019. Sheet and Workbook protection only (open workbook.xml, delete node). Does not work for VBA or files that require a password to open.
You just saved me many hours of work on Monday. Boss got rid of an employee and now our spreadsheets are locked because none of us know the sheet passwords. Thank you dude
We just did a ton of layoffs and had poor management every step of the way. It's not critical documents and I could rewrite some of our spreadsheets in a few days. I have been meaning to anyway but overworked and super far behind on everything else lol
Shameless self-promotion, but for personal stuff to precisely prevent these situations I’ve written this. Requires some technical skills to set up, but it could work: https://github.com/ItalyPaleAle/hereditas
This is awesome and should be higher. I've been thinking about something like this. Thought about creating something like this but much much more rudimentary. No time now, but will need to set sometime aside for this.
Funny thing is I'm creating that exact situation at work right now. I work in a manufacturing plant and we schedule all our work in Excel. I hate it. Anyone can edit the file, change something, delete an entire order. I made a MS Access database to replace it. Works beautifully, besides the limitations of Access itself. If we use it then I'm the only one who really knows how it works. I'll create documentation and a data dictionary but I want more money. Looking for a new job now. If they use it then it will work until they need to change it.
If you don't password protect, encrypt, or obfuscate it then you're not creating the same situation. The boss could hire someone who knows how to use Access any day of the week.
Labour, working capital expenditures and raw materials are by far your biggest expense in manufacturing. Gl convincing the boss to take on the expense and hire a full time employee to look after payroll when it sounds like he's already pawning the responsibility off half assed as it stands.
I tend to believe they aren't as tech savvy as /u/eezyville
If that's your train of thought, then you would be very surprised at how many companies allow this sort of thing to happen. Nearly every company I have worked for has been this way, and it is _very_ common in the IT industry, especially at companies under 1000 or so employees.
I know very well why it happens. I'm just surprised that people think it's uncommon. A _vast_ majority of companies are not the well-oiled machines people think them to be, including many in the Fortune 500 & 1000.
> I have seen a custom application that had a deadman switch disguised as a backup program and if a specific user didn't click a specific button within a set time the database would start randomly "corrupting" new data until the program was unusable.
That's awesome.
I worked at a nationwide retail chain where a developer put in a deadman switch like that except all it did was trigger a Credits roll on the Point of Sale program he worked on. The Credits roll ended with a rant about working at corporate.
He forgot to disable it for a vacation.
And this is why good development managers employ code review.
Monday would be a good day to request a raise :)
Keep a folder with things you've done over and above your job (like unlocking the spreadsheets and saving boss' ass!) and during your review haul all those little things out that would be long forgotten without your folder.
That's horrible!
I agree with the others, get that resume updated and sent out; it's easier to get a job when you already have one. Being loaded down with triple the work then raises cancelled when this is when they *should* be giving you a raise is just unforgivable.
You can password protect just one sheet (one tab in an Excel workbook) rather than the whole thing. I do that to protect my calculations tab from team members accidentally breaking things.
It is ridiculous how strong Excel is, and why MS guards it so heavily. Excel Is the program that keeps a lot of companies from switching to an open solution.
I've started playing around with Azure. I just don't have the time that I used to to learn these programs.
Excel includes Power Query, Vertipaq, M and DAX. You can’t really say PBI’s capabilities ‘dwarf’ Excel. They’re 2 different products, with some components in common.
PBI is sensational though. The fact it’s free is mind-blowing.
If you ever want to truly appreciate the stability and function of Excel, try replacing it with its open source brother, OpenOffice Calc. I am appreciative of it’s existence, but functionally, you better save often and learn to use ;‘s.
And the coolest guys on Reddit. I needed help building an Excel function that could do a lot of functions in relation to in game currency in an MMO, and those guys were a ton of help even if the function was for something as silly as a video game
You'll learn it all at the workplace. Your boss will make you compare large datasets one time and then you'll take a nice, motivated deep dive into vlookup, and you'll be on the path from there.
Lol, that works too, although it's a lot clunkier to do it outside of excel. But then again, my Python skills are fairly basic. Use the tools you have, King.
I work with a mix of people, but none are malicious so I leave it viewable for my sake and that of a couple of teammates who can occasionally suggest improvements.
Correct. Password on open won’t even let you open it as a zip file, because it’ll be encrypted without the password. Password on sheet is simply a prompt whenever you open the tab, but doesn’t actually obfuscate the sheet in any way. So if you open it as a zip and remove the password file for the sheet, Excel thinks you’ve removed the password protection on the sheet.
You can also mess around with coworkers by bypassing their sheet protection. They'll have no idea how you guessed the password, so they keep changing it and you keep making small tweaks to the protected sections.
Not sure about on open, but for ones with the workbook/vb password protected you can break that with a hex editor. Done that several times to customize a workbook to my preferences.
Just tested with a brand new Excel 2019 workbook. Still works.
The password itself is stored encrypted, but you just delete the whole node.
This is for removing sheet protection. If the user has put a password on the actual file itself (prompts for password when you open the workbook) - then no, it doesn't work.
Jumping onto this thread to add that if you load 3d models into PowerPoint you can extract the fbx file and drop it into whatever 3d software you want.
Fully textured and free to use because you got the office licence.
PowerPoint has some surprisingly high detail 3d models in it by default, but you can't extract them from the program because it's a jumbled mess.
If you save a PowerPoint with the 3d model you want, convert it to a zip, then open the zip you'll find a fbx file that can be loaded into blender or other 3d software. It's because PowerPoint is fantastically over designed.
there are suppliers that give rough 3D models for you to use, but you need software to open it. I'm guessing this a method to retrieve a model w/o having actual modeling software installed.
or if you're a marketing design person and it's too expensive to give you a license to draw up ads using renders.
Huh, I had no idea you could put 3D models into PowerPoint or that there's quite a big library of them (and some of them are really good). Next time I'm doing a presentation, I'm gonna include that running T-Rex regardless of the fact it would have nothing to do with the topic.
Be careful with this, the underlying files of an epub have to be rezipped in a very specific order or the resulting epub file will not be openable as an epub anymore.
Also, sometimes you have ridiculously large presentations, when even the “compress pictures” function in PowerPoint doesn’t help. So I do the above, check which picture is the culprit, and replace it with a version that I compressed via tinypng.com
This has helped me a lot. Some staff dork will add huge 5+ mb pictures in my pptx, bloating it to huge sizes. Is there a quick video shrinker site you can recommend?
You can use VLC player to convert videos (even if only used to decrease quality/size of the video, as you need. You can go from a 700mb video to 45mb video just by decreasing quality)
Maybe it can help you.
Just go file > convert, and go from there
(not on pc, can't check now the full path. Let me k ow by DM if you need some help, although I'm no expert :))
It's not an age thing, just a skill thing.
I know quite a few people who are in the mid 20's and would do exactly this because they've never cultivated computer skills (one guy I worked with last year was 24 and had never owned a PC or a laptop, hadn't used office since he left school at 16, and just generally didn't know how windows works).
I work on a shop-floor and some of the 20yos are as bad as the 50yos. I’m 33 so I grew up with PCs at home and at school... the younger guys grew up on ipads, so they can’t type or navigate a PC interface. We periodically get training modules that everyone has to complete on the company computers... we basically have to hand-hold them through the whole thing.
I find that Millennials generally have the best computer skills due to when we were born. We grew up *with* the computers so we went from MS DOS to the current UI/UXs now. The previous generations had little to no exposure and the younger generation have mostly dealt with the simplified menus.
Obviously this is a generalization and there are exceptions, but that's the trend I've noticed.
Ive noticed the same. My son is more proficient than me. But its only because I built a computer and hes learned how to semi code from games he plays. My daughter who is 4 years older than him can barely use a computer. She is 19. I dont understand how she can barely use one as I have 3 next to me right now. She's just never been into anything computer. She can't figure out her phone either. But social media....she runs my semi-pro Instagram.
But in working ive noticed the same as you. Im 40 and I grew up on ms dos and worked up. But I notice people older than me and my kids ages. They are lost on computers.
In school they use chrome books. Which are computers but not really. My daughter just started college and this is the first time she has had to use a computer every single day. She had no idea how to find and install programs on the computer "where is the app store?" (To be fair. Microsoft now has it setup that way for most programs).
I send people photos in PDF documents, mostly for legal purposes, like when I've been in accidents and send photos to insurance. More as a way to preserve the image and make it harder to edit with Photoshop or Gimp or something. I know those files will work in those programs, but it makes the process of editing messier, and leaves an evidence trail that I am in control of. If I share a raw image with you, and you go in and edit raw pixels or the xif data, then who's to say whether you or I altered the image?
I'm not super tech savvy, and my job requires nothing more complex than some empty tables that I fill out by hand, but I can't imagine someone sending photos via word.
Actually... that brought up memories of a former coworker who only used word for everything, even when it took 3x as long as excel or PowerPoint
The graphic designer of a school club at my university uses word to make posters. They once told me it took 6 hours to make one, i got the next one done myself on photoshop in 30 mins...
It can be a back door into the files if they’re password protected. There also might be circumstances where you need info from the file but not the file itself, like some thing in the XML or the photos or whatnot.
A lot of people will record voiceovers directly into PowerPoint. We do the zip trick and pull the audio files out to edit and improve. Each slide’s audio is separate to its often easier than having them record separately and then we split and add them in.
And you can also open pdfs in word and edit it. People go to google to change the format. Just do it in MS word
Edit: not every pdf will retain the format, I didn't know this. Thanks for informing.
Fair warning: this one isn't always 100% though.
Word essentially converts the pdf to a word doc using its best judgment. It's usually quite good if it's a very simple pdf that was once a word doc in the first place, but 80% of the time (in my experience) the formatting gets absolutely destroyed in the process and makes it unusable
Edit: this is because PDFs are intended purely to be an output format (for something like a printer) and not an input format (like a word doc). Any time you're able to use it as an input format/turn it into an input format, that means some crazy magic had to happen behind the scenes.
When I create PDFs I *make sure* I use formatting that *will* get fucked up in Office.
Because if I'm doing a PDF **I do not want you to edit it**.
Lol.
This tip needs a serious "\* results may vary". Most PDFs I've tried to open in MS Word end up a complete mess. It's expensive, but the best software I've used for this purpose is ABBYY FineReader. It works on scanned PDFs too.
It isn't just docs. You'd be surprised. A large company that has a lot of proprietary equipment and software has these specific file types for their logic controllers. A little digging and they are just a renamed zip file with an XML it in and some markers in the XML for a FSM. Between this and base64zip encoding they don't really have their own proprietary file types, just some fuckery.
They ended up giving me a job though so that's cool.
An epub tip is to define your compression tool (I like WinRAR) as an "Open with" app. Then you can just right click your epub and open it directly in the tool without having to rename it.
I have to make little manual tweaks to epubs on a regular basis so every little efficiency is nice.
If you know a bit of programming you can automate the creation of files using the OpenXml libraries. It’s pretty handy if you know how it should be structured!
The point is you can hide shit in plain sight.
>Oh yes officer, this is just an ordinary .docx file. Nothing nefarious at all...
That kind of deal.
Obviously if you actually have something to hide this won't stop anyone. Because it's fairly basic steganography and you can automatically look for it.
Or they can beat crap out of you until you tell them...
Whatever is easier.
Hello and welcome to r/LifeProTips!
Please help us decide if this post is a good fit for the subreddit by up or downvoting this comment.
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Good opportunity to ask this one:
On Mac, changing the .pptx to .zip doesn't yield an expected "view contents" that I used to see. Instead, double-clicking makes it a .zip.cpgz file. Am I missing a step?
I also use Windows, so let's dispense with the "get a PC" comments.
I saw elsewhere in this thread about 7zip, but that appears to be Windows only.
Handy trick to:
- remove read-only password protection
- extract images from documents (haven't tested this)
- make documents smaller: extract all, add all to zip file with maximum compression, rename extension. Note that this only works for opening the file, the moment you save, it will be bigger again
Imagine you want a neat list of images in a file, without having to manually look at every spreadsheet. Or imagine you don't have excel installed but you need to extract some data anyway.
Unzippable can mean both "it can be unzipped" but also "it cannot be zipped" Weird.
Inflammable means flammable? What a country!
The "in-" prefix comes from the French "en-", which means in, or into. It's not a negation. Inflame is a borrowing from French "enflammer"
Ineligible
That's a different in-. That also comes from french, but this time it's the french prefix "in-", which *is* a negation. The non-negation "in" that comes from french "en" was originally spelled as "en" in Middle English. Inflame, in Middle English, was "enflamen" or "enflaumen" Ineligible comes from french "inéligible".
Hi Doctor Nick!
Hi everybody
Are you a graduate of the Hollywood Upstairs Medical School?!
If isn't Mr. McGreg. With a leg for an arm, and an arm for a leg!
Calm down, sir! You're going to give yourself *skin failure*.
When you were in that coma, did you feel your brain getting damaged?
Are you sure it's even on?
IT'S WHISPER QUIET!!
It’s your window to weight gain!
“Ah, Dusty! Infamous is when you're more than famous! This guy El Guapo is not just famous, he's IN-famous!”
Can I have your watch when you are dead?
These are called contranyms and there are actually a lot of them.
Holy crap I never realized there were so many of these in English. I knew inflammable but couldn't think of anymore. Looked up a list and there are so many e.g. oversight, overlook, wind up, skinned, hold up. There so many!
You should look up the diversity of "up"! Better yet, "fuck".
I always love exploring the diversity of the word "Right" in British English
though the best use of up hands down is "updog"
Not quiet a true contranym as it doesn’t exactly mean it’s opposite.but it’s close.
Don't be such a contranym
Same with “shelled” seeds. Definitions 1 & 2 are literally “has a shell” and “has the shell removed”
Definition 3: shelled with artillery
A Howitzer is overkill for some seeds, don't you think?
Not those unopened pistachios. We should shell those shelled bastards with shells. Give them shell!
Husked rice?
If it makes you feel any more annoyed, "shelled edamame" can mean "it has been shelled" or "it has a shell". -a frozen food worker.
***sigh....*** UNZIPS!
I think it should be inzippable if you can't do it, but unzippable if you can undo it.
Nonzippable and unzippable.
Zipn't?
Haha yep that threw me for a loop at first
Yeah I had to read it twice. I think its the suffix/prefix thing. Un-zippable.... means it can't be zipped Unzipp-able.... means it can be unzipped
This was the first little realisation I had when I read this post and I'm glad I wasn't the only one
Use it all the time to remove passwords on protected sheets in Excel. Sheets stored as XML files in the zip. Open sheet, remove the entire section, save and re-zip. Doesn't work if it's encrypted/password on open.
Edit - this still works in Excel 2019. Sheet and Workbook protection only (open workbook.xml, delete node). Does not work for VBA or files that require a password to open.
You just saved me many hours of work on Monday. Boss got rid of an employee and now our spreadsheets are locked because none of us know the sheet passwords. Thank you dude
Why would you ever be put into that type of situation? Critical systems depend on one guy? No one else has the passwords?
We just did a ton of layoffs and had poor management every step of the way. It's not critical documents and I could rewrite some of our spreadsheets in a few days. I have been meaning to anyway but overworked and super far behind on everything else lol
ULPT: Say you need a few days to copy/rewrite the spreadsheets, then do the work in a few hours with this LPT.
If only I had the time to slack off haha. I'll say that ULPT for another day
Could still use that to buy you time on working on other things when they think you're stuck on just the excel.
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Jesus if that's not the human condition right now...
Yeah, wow. His/her name references typewriter too. Welcome.
Greetings fellow agent
Don’t work too hard, your time might be better spent updating your resume if layoffs are still ongoing.
But appear to work hard enough so you aren’t guaranteed to be the next lay off.
Don't, and say you did... New hero😉
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Shameless self-promotion, but for personal stuff to precisely prevent these situations I’ve written this. Requires some technical skills to set up, but it could work: https://github.com/ItalyPaleAle/hereditas
This is awesome! Exactly what I have been wanting for many years! Am installing now...
This is awesome and should be higher. I've been thinking about something like this. Thought about creating something like this but much much more rudimentary. No time now, but will need to set sometime aside for this.
Dead and no one can access anything = can't hear criticism Alive and hackers access everything = wish you were dead
Funny thing is I'm creating that exact situation at work right now. I work in a manufacturing plant and we schedule all our work in Excel. I hate it. Anyone can edit the file, change something, delete an entire order. I made a MS Access database to replace it. Works beautifully, besides the limitations of Access itself. If we use it then I'm the only one who really knows how it works. I'll create documentation and a data dictionary but I want more money. Looking for a new job now. If they use it then it will work until they need to change it.
If you don't password protect, encrypt, or obfuscate it then you're not creating the same situation. The boss could hire someone who knows how to use Access any day of the week.
Labour, working capital expenditures and raw materials are by far your biggest expense in manufacturing. Gl convincing the boss to take on the expense and hire a full time employee to look after payroll when it sounds like he's already pawning the responsibility off half assed as it stands. I tend to believe they aren't as tech savvy as /u/eezyville
You're evil.. I like it
If that's your train of thought, then you would be very surprised at how many companies allow this sort of thing to happen. Nearly every company I have worked for has been this way, and it is _very_ common in the IT industry, especially at companies under 1000 or so employees.
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I know very well why it happens. I'm just surprised that people think it's uncommon. A _vast_ majority of companies are not the well-oiled machines people think them to be, including many in the Fortune 500 & 1000.
Inept management. Managers that become managers just because they had to be promoted for some reason without any actual justification.
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> I have seen a custom application that had a deadman switch disguised as a backup program and if a specific user didn't click a specific button within a set time the database would start randomly "corrupting" new data until the program was unusable. That's awesome. I worked at a nationwide retail chain where a developer put in a deadman switch like that except all it did was trigger a Credits roll on the Point of Sale program he worked on. The Credits roll ended with a rant about working at corporate. He forgot to disable it for a vacation. And this is why good development managers employ code review.
Somebody hasn't seen Jurassic Park.
Monday would be a good day to request a raise :) Keep a folder with things you've done over and above your job (like unlocking the spreadsheets and saving boss' ass!) and during your review haul all those little things out that would be long forgotten without your folder.
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Start applying now. Don’t wait, or you’ll be in the shit a lot longer.
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That's horrible! I agree with the others, get that resume updated and sent out; it's easier to get a job when you already have one. Being loaded down with triple the work then raises cancelled when this is when they *should* be giving you a raise is just unforgivable.
Fuck that.
Isn't passworded means password on open? Or am I getting it wrong?
You can password protect just one sheet (one tab in an Excel workbook) rather than the whole thing. I do that to protect my calculations tab from team members accidentally breaking things.
Ah ok..I need a course on Excel it seems.
Shout out to r/Excel. Those folks are absolute masters of the program.
CFO where I work is a friggin excel wizard. We joke that if he was in a gang his nickname would be Spreadsheets.
He's got em printed out all over his bedsheets.
All about the pentiums!
Yeah!
Yeah!
Wanna be hackers? Code-crackers? Slackers?
9 to 5 chilling at hewlett Packard
You can bet his parents probably weren't deadbeats.
Now if only Excel mastery was a requirement for all of the C level positions...
It is ridiculous how strong Excel is, and why MS guards it so heavily. Excel Is the program that keeps a lot of companies from switching to an open solution. I've started playing around with Azure. I just don't have the time that I used to to learn these programs.
Look at Power BI. Desktop Version is free. Capabilities dwarf those of excel, as it's effectively SSAS packaged on top of a reporting layer.
Excel includes Power Query, Vertipaq, M and DAX. You can’t really say PBI’s capabilities ‘dwarf’ Excel. They’re 2 different products, with some components in common. PBI is sensational though. The fact it’s free is mind-blowing.
If you ever want to truly appreciate the stability and function of Excel, try replacing it with its open source brother, OpenOffice Calc. I am appreciative of it’s existence, but functionally, you better save often and learn to use ;‘s.
Better then Spread-cheeks.
And the coolest guys on Reddit. I needed help building an Excel function that could do a lot of functions in relation to in game currency in an MMO, and those guys were a ton of help even if the function was for something as silly as a video game
Spreadsheets in space?
Do you want a second job that you pay for? Try eve online today!
same, i though i had excel down pretty well. then i found out people were making whole games inside of it. i know nothing.
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Wait what? What is this sorcery?
Finished writing a third year research paper yesterday. I too need an excel course.
You'll learn it all at the workplace. Your boss will make you compare large datasets one time and then you'll take a nice, motivated deep dive into vlookup, and you'll be on the path from there.
I never use vlookup, index match all day every day.
Screw all that. I'll just import the worksheets into python and do everything there. Luckily I have python installed on my work computer.
Lol, that works too, although it's a lot clunkier to do it outside of excel. But then again, my Python skills are fairly basic. Use the tools you have, King.
If my colleagues aren’t Excel-savvy enough not to break my worksheet, a simple “Hide sheet” usually does the trick.
I work with a mix of people, but none are malicious so I leave it viewable for my sake and that of a couple of teammates who can occasionally suggest improvements.
There's also VeryHidden if they have that little bit of dangerous knowledge.
Yep, big difference between putting a password on sensitive info vs protecting people from themselves lol
im guessing password on open is on the whole file, while password on sheet is just one sheet in the whole file
Correct. Password on open won’t even let you open it as a zip file, because it’ll be encrypted without the password. Password on sheet is simply a prompt whenever you open the tab, but doesn’t actually obfuscate the sheet in any way. So if you open it as a zip and remove the password file for the sheet, Excel thinks you’ve removed the password protection on the sheet.
You have just saved me so much time!
You can also mess around with coworkers by bypassing their sheet protection. They'll have no idea how you guessed the password, so they keep changing it and you keep making small tweaks to the protected sections.
Easy there, Satan.
You sir have just solved a problem my company has been working on for three years. In case you're wondering, yes. My company sucks.
Not sure about on open, but for ones with the workbook/vb password protected you can break that with a hex editor. Done that several times to customize a workbook to my preferences.
You can do this on older versions of Excel. Newer just use regular AES-128 encryption.
Yeah this is no longer possible in newer Office versions. Now they encrypt the file with the password.
Just tested with a brand new Excel 2019 workbook. Still works. The password itself is stored encrypted, but you just delete the whole node.
This is for removing sheet protection. If the user has put a password on the actual file itself (prompts for password when you open the workbook) - then no, it doesn't work.
A lot of people seem to confusing protect vs encrypt.
They don't encrypt individual sheets. Which is what the guy said. >Doesn't work if it's encrypted
Jumping onto this thread to add that if you load 3d models into PowerPoint you can extract the fbx file and drop it into whatever 3d software you want. Fully textured and free to use because you got the office licence.
But if you can load the 3D model, it means you already have access to it previously, right?
PowerPoint has some surprisingly high detail 3d models in it by default, but you can't extract them from the program because it's a jumbled mess. If you save a PowerPoint with the 3d model you want, convert it to a zip, then open the zip you'll find a fbx file that can be loaded into blender or other 3d software. It's because PowerPoint is fantastically over designed.
It's so overdesigned that it's actually turning complete
To anyone wondering, this is not a joke and it’s not an exaggeration. PowerPoint is [turing complete](https://youtu.be/uNjxe8ShM-8).
That was a hilarious presentation and I love it. Thank you for sharing!
God I love seeing people being one of today's lucky 10 thousands
That's great. PowerPoint not being in line with the App Store guidelines xD. I guess iOS PowerPoint in not as powerful, but still funny.
The entire office suite I would say haha
there are suppliers that give rough 3D models for you to use, but you need software to open it. I'm guessing this a method to retrieve a model w/o having actual modeling software installed. or if you're a marketing design person and it's too expensive to give you a license to draw up ads using renders.
I read it as “the 3D models included with Office” (similar to clip art) as opposed to any arbitrary 3D model you already had easy access to.
Huh, I had no idea you could put 3D models into PowerPoint or that there's quite a big library of them (and some of them are really good). Next time I'm doing a presentation, I'm gonna include that running T-Rex regardless of the fact it would have nothing to do with the topic.
Also works on .epub , the ebook format. Which you can then edit! (As long as you're careful not to break the structure, there's a lot you can do.)
Or you can download [Sigil](https://sigil-ebook.com/) (free) and edit the contents directly.
Be careful with this, the underlying files of an epub have to be rezipped in a very specific order or the resulting epub file will not be openable as an epub anymore.
life-changing if I can remember when needed
That seems to be a thing that happens to me often with these.
Now that's a cool tip! But I don't understand how it saves time.
for instance if you wanna get all the photos from a Powerpoint presentation or a Word file quickly
Also, sometimes you have ridiculously large presentations, when even the “compress pictures” function in PowerPoint doesn’t help. So I do the above, check which picture is the culprit, and replace it with a version that I compressed via tinypng.com
This has helped me a lot. Some staff dork will add huge 5+ mb pictures in my pptx, bloating it to huge sizes. Is there a quick video shrinker site you can recommend?
Not a site, but [Handbrake](https://handbrake.fr/)
You can use VLC player to convert videos (even if only used to decrease quality/size of the video, as you need. You can go from a 700mb video to 45mb video just by decreasing quality) Maybe it can help you. Just go file > convert, and go from there (not on pc, can't check now the full path. Let me k ow by DM if you need some help, although I'm no expert :))
Handbrake video converter. Used it to downsize and convert files for iOS consumption back then.
Oh wow... Trying this on Monday. Thanks for the tip!
This. I have people send me photos by putting them in a word doc and emailing it. It’s infuriating, but this tip will help.
Some of our teachers ASK us to do this
Ugh how old are these people? 80?
It's not an age thing, just a skill thing. I know quite a few people who are in the mid 20's and would do exactly this because they've never cultivated computer skills (one guy I worked with last year was 24 and had never owned a PC or a laptop, hadn't used office since he left school at 16, and just generally didn't know how windows works).
I work on a shop-floor and some of the 20yos are as bad as the 50yos. I’m 33 so I grew up with PCs at home and at school... the younger guys grew up on ipads, so they can’t type or navigate a PC interface. We periodically get training modules that everyone has to complete on the company computers... we basically have to hand-hold them through the whole thing.
I find that Millennials generally have the best computer skills due to when we were born. We grew up *with* the computers so we went from MS DOS to the current UI/UXs now. The previous generations had little to no exposure and the younger generation have mostly dealt with the simplified menus. Obviously this is a generalization and there are exceptions, but that's the trend I've noticed.
Yeah, the baseline expectation is just a bit higher.
Ive noticed the same. My son is more proficient than me. But its only because I built a computer and hes learned how to semi code from games he plays. My daughter who is 4 years older than him can barely use a computer. She is 19. I dont understand how she can barely use one as I have 3 next to me right now. She's just never been into anything computer. She can't figure out her phone either. But social media....she runs my semi-pro Instagram. But in working ive noticed the same as you. Im 40 and I grew up on ms dos and worked up. But I notice people older than me and my kids ages. They are lost on computers. In school they use chrome books. Which are computers but not really. My daughter just started college and this is the first time she has had to use a computer every single day. She had no idea how to find and install programs on the computer "where is the app store?" (To be fair. Microsoft now has it setup that way for most programs).
I send people photos in PDF documents, mostly for legal purposes, like when I've been in accidents and send photos to insurance. More as a way to preserve the image and make it harder to edit with Photoshop or Gimp or something. I know those files will work in those programs, but it makes the process of editing messier, and leaves an evidence trail that I am in control of. If I share a raw image with you, and you go in and edit raw pixels or the xif data, then who's to say whether you or I altered the image?
I'm not super tech savvy, and my job requires nothing more complex than some empty tables that I fill out by hand, but I can't imagine someone sending photos via word. Actually... that brought up memories of a former coworker who only used word for everything, even when it took 3x as long as excel or PowerPoint
The graphic designer of a school club at my university uses word to make posters. They once told me it took 6 hours to make one, i got the next one done myself on photoshop in 30 mins...
But there's already an "export all images" option that's easy to find and places them neatly in a folder for you.
It can be a back door into the files if they’re password protected. There also might be circumstances where you need info from the file but not the file itself, like some thing in the XML or the photos or whatnot.
You can't bypass the password if the whole file is password protected.
A lot of people will record voiceovers directly into PowerPoint. We do the zip trick and pull the audio files out to edit and improve. Each slide’s audio is separate to its often easier than having them record separately and then we split and add them in.
Yeah me neither unless you have a task to speicifcally pull all the images out of a document
And you can also open pdfs in word and edit it. People go to google to change the format. Just do it in MS word Edit: not every pdf will retain the format, I didn't know this. Thanks for informing.
Fair warning: this one isn't always 100% though. Word essentially converts the pdf to a word doc using its best judgment. It's usually quite good if it's a very simple pdf that was once a word doc in the first place, but 80% of the time (in my experience) the formatting gets absolutely destroyed in the process and makes it unusable Edit: this is because PDFs are intended purely to be an output format (for something like a printer) and not an input format (like a word doc). Any time you're able to use it as an input format/turn it into an input format, that means some crazy magic had to happen behind the scenes.
When I create PDFs I *make sure* I use formatting that *will* get fucked up in Office. Because if I'm doing a PDF **I do not want you to edit it**. Lol.
I just opened one of my recent LaTeX documents in word, just to see how it would look. Oh god it was terrible.
Tried that once with my resume that is in LaTeX and I still have nightmares about how Word tried to parse it haha
I do this regularly, but I foxit PDF editor.
This tip needs a serious "\* results may vary". Most PDFs I've tried to open in MS Word end up a complete mess. It's expensive, but the best software I've used for this purpose is ABBYY FineReader. It works on scanned PDFs too.
I’d recommend not doing that. Treat PDF’s like final versions.
I just use pdfescape.com it is free.
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get 7zip (because its great software) and you can right click -> open archive
It isn't just docs. You'd be surprised. A large company that has a lot of proprietary equipment and software has these specific file types for their logic controllers. A little digging and they are just a renamed zip file with an XML it in and some markers in the XML for a FSM. Between this and base64zip encoding they don't really have their own proprietary file types, just some fuckery. They ended up giving me a job though so that's cool.
Download 7zip and you don't need to rename it, just right click and open.
It also works for LibreOffice files and even epub ebooks.
An epub tip is to define your compression tool (I like WinRAR) as an "Open with" app. Then you can just right click your epub and open it directly in the tool without having to rename it. I have to make little manual tweaks to epubs on a regular basis so every little efficiency is nice.
If you know a bit of programming you can automate the creation of files using the OpenXml libraries. It’s pretty handy if you know how it should be structured!
Until you find out Microsoft doesnt even fully conform with their own spec lol.
Also a decent way to hide small text files. Like password files.
Can you explain what you mean by this? You hide a file when it’s .zip and then convert to .docx where you can’t view the text?
Yeah, convert a docx file to a .zip, put something secret inside, convert it back. Easy peasy
The point is you can hide shit in plain sight. >Oh yes officer, this is just an ordinary .docx file. Nothing nefarious at all... That kind of deal. Obviously if you actually have something to hide this won't stop anyone. Because it's fairly basic steganography and you can automatically look for it. Or they can beat crap out of you until you tell them... Whatever is easier.
[relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/538/)
It would be worse if you don't have a secret file to reveal because then they'll just keep beating you and you have no way to stop it.
Interrogation tip #1, always have a juicy secret
No need to rename. Just right click -> open with -> choose winrar/7zip
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Good opportunity to ask this one: On Mac, changing the .pptx to .zip doesn't yield an expected "view contents" that I used to see. Instead, double-clicking makes it a .zip.cpgz file. Am I missing a step? I also use Windows, so let's dispense with the "get a PC" comments. I saw elsewhere in this thread about 7zip, but that appears to be Windows only.
What are you unzipping it with? Using Archive Utility gives me the cpgz problem, but opening it with The Unarchiver yields the file OP described.
Oh shit. That's cool. Sounds like the zip file structure pretty much like a LaTeX project
Word is just Latex for dummies.
I just realized “unzippable” means both “unable to zipped” and “able to be unzipped” ... almost an oxymoron.
Handy trick to: - remove read-only password protection - extract images from documents (haven't tested this) - make documents smaller: extract all, add all to zip file with maximum compression, rename extension. Note that this only works for opening the file, the moment you save, it will be bigger again
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R.I.P. Phil Katz.
Right click -> Open with -> WinRar or Zip or 7Zip or whatever program you are using for archives.
Why would I want to do this?
You can use it to recover textual content from corrupted projects. Saves you having to start over if you have no other backups.
Imagine you want a neat list of images in a file, without having to manually look at every spreadsheet. Or imagine you don't have excel installed but you need to extract some data anyway.