Facebook for Professional Networking

You too can learn how to use Facebook like a pro. My presentation to the Marina Pacifica Job Club on how to use Facebook to increase your social capital is found here.

Moving Outlook 2007 Contacts to Mac OS X Address Book

In the never ending fun of existing in the dual platform world - I have encountered many problems. Two of my biggest headaches as an educator is coordinating and syncing all my contacts, emails, and other stuff between all my PC and macs and iPhone.

The newest crisis is handling a program that should do all this easily - Mobile Me. I subscribe to this service for the many advantages it offers. The best one is to have a "cloud" where I can store important files and access them anywhere via the internet. The problem is that Mobile Me does not work well on the PC. I use my PC as my base computer and do most of my work there and update all my contacts in Outlook 2007. The real hurt is that Mobile Me does not sync with the PC properly. The contacts in Mobile Me will not change or take updates from the PC (replace) even though I change the settings to do this.

The solution - I deleted all the contacts on my MacBook's Address book and copied my contacts from my PC (outlined below with updates for Outlook 2007 in Windows7) to the MacBook and then I synced the MacBook to Mobile Me and the data was finally replaced. Now all my computers are in sync. Of course now I will have keep syncing this way but until they fix Mobile Me that's all one can do.

See the steps below I took to move my contacts from Outlook 2007 to the Mac Address Book:

1. Open Outlook Contacts list.
2. Select all your contacts. This may be easiest in “Address Cards” view.
3. In the “Action” menu, select “Send Full contact”, and "In Internet Format (vCard)".
4. Wait (really.........)a moment ..........while Outlook creates a new email with all of your contacts attached to it as vCards.
5. Send this email to yourself (be careful not to send it to anyone else, obviously).
6. Upon receipt of this email, save all the attachments to a location your mac can access (create a folder to put them all in), then import them into your Mac OS X Address Book and you're done.
   

Don’t bother with Outlook’s “export cvs/text” or “save as” functions. They’re extremely clunky and the amount of manual clean up you need to do for misplaced data is insane.

Reference

The Mac versus the PC....again with feeling Excel Analysis Tool Pack

I have had this endless debate with colleagues, students, and friends for years. "Which is better, the Mac or the PC?" My June 2010 answer has to be the PC.

Why? I have been spending months creating assignments for my bio-statistics classes and have run into continuous problems with the Mac. For starters, excellent stat programs like SPSS (statistical package for the social sciences) won't even run on the new Mac OS operating system (snow-leopard). The frustration my students who use the mac have had to endure is hard to describe without explicatives. New versions of the software work with the mac - but they are expensive.

Now enter the Microsoft excel problem. The new (well, not so new as the 2010 version is out) Excel 2007 has a great statistical feature called the Analysis Tool Pack (ATP) that can easily do advanced statistical analysis. This is a great solution for cash strapped students who already have doled out lots of cash for Microsoft software. PC users can add this Tool Pack with a simple add-in.

Mac users are not so lucky. The Tool Pack is not available to them as an add-in. You must download another program (StatPlus:mac LE ) to get the Tool Pack. And here's the kicker - if your want the advanced analyzes, you have to by the upgrade for $250. And the download warns about the instability of the program. I'll have to let you know about that in another post after I test run the program on my Mac.

I know that this must be some continuous way for Microsoft to rule the world, but today the PC wins.

Avoid the tiff decompressor error

Many times in my teaching (statistics especially), I have received WORD documents from students using a mac and on my PC (running Windows 7) the images get replaced with the error message "Quick time and a tiff decompressor are needed to view image"?

Below is a guide (and link) you can follow (I cut and paste this and post it to my classes) to avoid this error:

When you're making your WORD documents on a MAC - you don't want to cut & paste your graphic into your WORD program. DO NOT DO THAT. The worst culprit is graphs from mac excel documents into mac word/powerpoint.

What you want to do is copy the graph into an image program like photoshop or paintshop pro and then save to a JPG file.

Then you need to format -->insert-->image-from-file into your documents (MS Word/Powerpoint).

That is all there is to it.

Reference