Shortcut to Increase/Decrease Font Size

Sometimes when you’re putting text into your project, you don’t know exactly what font size you’d like to use – so you play around with it a bit. Rather than selecting a new font size from your toolbar, or adjusting it in the Font dialog box, there are a couple of keyboard shortcuts that I find are really great to use. Holding down the Ctrl button on your keyboard, then pressing either “[” or “[” will grow or shrink your font by 1 pt.

Ctrl + [ shrinks the font by 1 pt

Ctrl + ] grows the font by 1 pt
You can use these in Outlook, Publisher, PowerPoint, and Word – unfortunately it doesn’t work in Excel. Cheers!

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Excel: Pi function

Some people call today “Pi Day”, because it’s 3/14. In honour of this, today’s post will be concerning the pi function in Excel! People like myself whose jobs don’t really involve this sort of math won’t find this terribly helpful, but for anyone who needs to perform calculations using pi in Excel – this is the function for you!

=PI()

This will return pi, accurate to 15 digits.

3.14159265358979

As awesome as that function is, I think I’ll personally celebrate “Pi Day” with a slice of apple pie! That’s my kind of pie. Cheers!

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PowerPoint: Why is my video playing as a white box?

Here's an interesting little problem. You've inserted a video into a slide of your presentation, positioned it where you'd like it, then run your presentation and... it doesn't work. It's showing up as a white box. What's the deal?

You try playing the video outside of PowerPoint, and it works just fine. You check to see that it's in a PowerPoint-compatible video format, and it is. So why won't it play?

The answer is this: the filepath for the video is too long. PowerPoint can only handle media files with filepaths of 128 or fewer characters. So if the video is hiding away in C:\\A\Very\Obscure\Folder\Somewhere\Deep\Inside\Your\Computer\Or\Perhaps\With\A\Ridiculously\Long\Name, PowerPoint will be unable to locate and play the video in the presentation.

Solutions?

One would be to move the video file to a location with a smaller filepath. Or, move it to the same folder in which your PowerPoint presentation is saved. Even if the filepath is still more than 128 characters long, the video file will play if it's in the same directory as the PowerPoint file.

N.B.: This isn't the only problem that can occur with videos not working in PowerPoint, and I will address some other common issues in future posts or as requested.

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