Tricks of the Trade

Replacement trick | Preserve your sanity when your machine freezes


Make your life a little easier with this simple replacement trick for graphic/photo updating.

Ever worked on a desktop publishing job where the graphic needed to be replaced or updated?

Or ever used a graphic as a placeholder where you needed to update it with the final graphic?

Enter extra work. Reflow problems. Different line breaks. Unbalanced columns. Misplaced subheads. Only a few of the numerous problems that could occur.

We employ a trick here that practically eliminates any of the above mentioned problems providing the graphic is linked in from the outside and the two graphics are the same size. First, find the graphic that is currently linked to the page. Give it a different name (such as "Image-old"). Then give the new graphic the name of the original graphic.

Most applications will automatically import the new graphic into the place of the old graphic. Simply go into the extension manager or picture usage area, update the modified graphic, and voila - the old graphic is replaced with the new graphic with a minimal of effort!

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B. Preserve your sanity when your machine freezes with these simple tricks.

One of the most frustrating experiences in all of computer land has got to be a frozen machine especially when you are facing a deadline.

Lost work and time as the machine has to restart and go through all the preliminary rigmarole - what a pain!

But with a couple of tricks, work and time loss can be held to a minimum.

  1. First, (as if you didn't know)
    SAVE YOUR WORK FREQUENTLY at least every 5-10 minutes. Pressing command-S (Mac) or control-S (PC) will do it. This one easy deed has saved me countless hours of frustration. And it hardly ever fails that when I don't save frequently is when the program crashes.
  2. Second,
    WHEN A PROGRAM CRASHES, PRESS CONTROL+ALTERNATE+DELETE (PC) or COMMAND+OPTION+SHIFT+ESC (Mac). Rather than making you restart the computer, this will only quit the program you are currently in. Often you will only need to restart the program rather than restart the whole machine (unless, of course, you experience a bomb).
  3. As an added benefit, if there is something running on your machine that you don't want (such as a virus), doing the above can close down the virus program and tell you the name of it