If you’ve updated to the new Mac version of Microsoft Office 2008, you may have noticed Word now saves files in Microsoft’s new DOCX format. The problem is, just as Windows users found, not everyone can open this new file format yet. The easy way to prevent compatibility problems with colleagues and co-workers is to […]

Managing serial numbers is a headache in almost every creative studio. If you have more than 3 designers on a network, someone has to take responsibility for keeping track of which serial numbers belong on which computers.

Creativetechs recommends that creative teams stop buying single-user copies of CS3. For the same cost, your studio can get a site license with a single serial number for your entire team. Here’s our tip from last year:

Transactional Licensing: Avoid serial number headaches with CS3!

But back to today’s tip: What if you are using a single-user copy of CS3, and you need to change which serial number is installed on a particular computer? It turns out Adobe makes changing the serial number easy as can be. No need to uninstall and reinstall software if you know where this “Erase my serial number” checkbox is located.

Some time ago I replaced the dock on my MacBook Pro with a picnic theme. Surprisingly, with all the wisdom I have at my disposal to provide clients, one of the most common questions I get these days is how they can have a picnic dock too. So I’m breaking down and documenting this little […]

Here is a quick tutorial for something we walk clients through all the time. Say you’ve forgotten your studio’s wireless Airport password. If you checked the “remember this network” option when you first connected wirelessly years ago, your long forgotten password awaits you now in Mac OS X’s Keychain Access utility.

We’d like to offer up a perfect April Fools Day prank to play on the Mac users in your life — the Kernel Panic screen saver. Download and install this beauty onto your target’s Mac. The result is a harmless (see warning) screensaver that faithfully emulates the horrifying experience of a Mac kernel panic. Doomslaser: […]

Do you have way too many items on your desktop? Do you hate cleaning up that mess? Camouflage, a free utility from Briksoftware, is the right tool for you. It hides all the icons and leaves nothing but the pure wallpaper. It’s the digital equivalent of sweeping everything under your bed. Briksoftware’s Camouflage Camouflage does […]

Renamer4Mac makes it easy to rename a large number of files. You just drag files or folders into its window, then adjust what you want to change. As you define your intended changes, Renamer4Mac previews in blue what each new file name will look like. When your file names appear the way you want them, you can apply the changes.

power4mac.com/renamer

This tool is perfect for designers who find themselves with a folder of files whose names need to be adjusted. For example, adding an identifying name to photos, along with a sequential number. Or changing the names of files for a website to lower case and replacing spaces with underscores.

In the past, changing the size of a Macintosh volume has been a significant undertaking, requiring third-party tools or offline reformatting. But, all that changes in Leopard. In the newest version of OS X, you can grow or shrink any HFS+ partition. The resizing is done live, and can even be performed on a mounted […]

Last week my family and I left for a much anticipated vacation in Italy. But rest assured, before we left town, our team queued up a fun collection of tips to run while we’re gone. If everything works properly, those tips should continue to flow uninterrupted each Monday until we return. In the spirit of […]

Over the years, our team fields lots of questions from clients needing to convert documents from one page layout program to another. For this tip we’ve compiled a number of utilities we’ve used and recommended. Q2ID — QuarkXpress to InDesign ID2Q — InDesign to QuarkXPress PUB2ID — Microsoft Publisher to InDesign PM2Q — PageMaker to […]