We have made a video to show how to print gridlines and borders in your Excel spreadsheet. Below the video, you will also find step by step instructions with images.

1. Open the spreadsheet or worksheet you want to print with gridlines or borders.

2. Go to “Print Preview”

3. This is how your worksheet would look like in print preview.

4. Click on “Preview” and then click on “Page Setup”. This will open the page setup dialogue box.

5. Go to the “Sheet” tab, check the “Gridlines” option and then click “Ok”.

6. Now your spreadsheet would look like this in the print preview.

You can now choose to print your spreadsheet or close the print preview.

In the default view, you will notice that your spreadsheet is as it is and no formatting has changed on it. But it will print with the gridlines when you send it to the printer.

Also note that if you want to print a sheet without gridlines you can always go to the Page Setup and uncheck the gridlines option.

How this is going to benefit you?

Right now implementing this will help Google display your profile picture on the content you have written. This will give credibility to your blog, increase the user trust, and will also help Google improve their search.

• Increases credibility of you as an expert in your niche.
• Increased trust level.
• Better page rankings.

As I mentioned earlier in my blog posts (here and here) that Google is now paying more attention to gauge a page’s importance using social matrices. The author tag enables search engines to find out more about an author and their credibility in a respective field. This tag will enable search engines to understand:

• Who you are.
• What are the topics you write about.
• Who likes your posts.
• How people interact with your content.
• People who interact with your content, what do they like.

How to add:

Step 1. Basically rel=author is just a hyperlink, which links to author’s Google profile. Like this:

<a href="https://plus.google.com/108579361730459688657" rel="author">Noumaan Yaqoob</a>

If you own a single author blog you can put this link anywhere on your pages.

Step 2. It was that easy to give yourself credit for a good blog post. There are people who might use this feature for writing poor content and give credit to other people. To avoid this, The Google profile page should also have a link back to your main domain.

There is more on how you can add this markup to your blogs with multiple authors. Check out this post on how to add it to a WordPress blog for multiple authors. Also check out this article on Webmaster Tools help pages.

Also watch this Webmaster’s Tools video in which Google’s Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson discuss authorship markup.

One way to do that is to manually enter data into your spreadsheet, which seems simple if you are only preparing a list of top 10 search results. What if you need to prepare a sheet showing top 50 results? Thankfully, it is not that difficult to do. You can download top results for any query to a CSV file and then import that file to Microsoft Office Excel or Open Office Spreadsheet.

Requirements:

1. Latest version of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome web browser.
2. SEOQuake addon which is available for both Firefox and Chrome.
3. MS Excel or Open Office

Install SEOQuake addon for your browser from SEOQuake website. Firefox users may need to restart browser to finish installation.

Go to Google, Yahoo, or Bing and search for the keywords you need to get results for.

Most search engines are now showing instant results and by default they show only 10 results per page. In order to quickly download top 30, 50 or even more results you need to change your search prefernces.

screenshot: Google Search Settings (click to enlarge)

Google: Go to Google.com and click on the settings button on the top right corner of the screen and select search settings. This will take you to your search preferences page and here you can turn off Google Instant. Just below the Google Instant you will see number of results to be shown, as soon as you turn off Google Instant this section will become editable. Select the number of results you want to be displayed for your queries.

Yahoo: Go to Yahoo Search, Click on More and Then Select Preferences. On Yahoo you don’t need to turn off Instant suggestions to get more than 10 results. Simply click on Edit in Display and layout section and select the number of results you want to be displayed.

Bing: Go to Bing.com and then click on Preferences (located at the top right corner of the page). Select the number of results you want to be displayed per page.

Now search using your keywords.

You will see your search results differently now. Here is a screenshot of what your search results page may look like.

Now click on the button Save to File. This will open a dialoge box asking you to save the file Farm Fresh Apples.csv to your computer. Save the file to a separate folder. Now download search results from all three search engines or just one. In this example we are just downloading Google Results.

CSV or .CSV means Comma Separated Values, this is usually a text file with each value separated by a comma. When you open this file with Microsoft Office Excel, it looks for a common delimiter. By default it assumes that your CSV file will have values separated by commas. However, the file you have downloaded with SEOQuake has values separated by a semicolon.

Before opening CSV file into Microsoft Office Excel, or Open Office Spreadhseet, we need to change semicolons into commas.

Open the CSV file in notepad.

Go to Edit > Replace

Screenshot: Search Results in Excel Sheet (Click to Enlarge)

Enter ; in the Find What field.

Enter , in Replace with field.

Now click Replace All.

This will replace all semicolons in your CSV file with commas. Press CTRL + S to save your csv file.

Open this CSV file in Microsoft office Excel or Open Office. Voila! you have your search results listed in a spread sheet. With lots of useful information about each link. If you don’t need that information you can delete those columns.

I personally don’t know enough about SEO to call my self an expert on the topic. However, blogging has taught me a few things and those few things worked really well for me until the Panda Update.

[For Non-IT folks: Social Web, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Panda Update Explained.]

Panda affected one of my blogs terribly and the number of pageviews per day dropped by more than 50%. Google’s algorithms believed that some of my pages are not that high quality.

Since Panda Update, I have become very interested in how Google is determining the quality of a page. Google uses a very complex algorithm to determine how it is going to display search results for a query. To make results more relevant, Google uses information it collects about their users.

Recently Google has indicated that they will be using recommendations from a user’s social circle to enhance search results and offer more relevant content. Tha launch of +1, just days before the launch of Google+ signifies that Google is going to become a more socially powered platform.

In my opinion Google’s social algorithms will (They have started this but in future it will become stronger) determine the quality of a page and it’s relevancy for results based on these social web factors:

• Previous interactions of a user with a website in search results. For example, if you click Wikipedia pages more often in your search results than a page from Wikipedia becomes eligible candidate to be in your top10 results for any query.
• If you have recommended content from that particular website on social platforms such as twitter and Google+ then it gains significance in your search results.
• Your friends have recommended a page by +1, Google Buzz, or Twitter.
• Your friends have shared a page on social platforms.
• Friends of Friends have recommended something.

Not all friends and social contacts are considered equal. You are more likely to click on content shared or recommended by the people you interact with more often. Currently, Google shows social results at the end of the search result’s page with the explanation that someone from social circles has recommended this page. However, the results that are not marked are also some how influenced by social metrices.

How it is generating the top results?

Google is not going to dump the technologies they have developed to display you the relevant results. Social elements will enhance search results but not totally overpower them. This means that your top results will be judged based on other quality matrices as well. Such as quality linkbacks, page load time, keywords matching the content, quality of content, originality and freshness of content, etc.

Now back to SEO, I don’t think that SEO industry is going to die, it will evolve itself and become more involved in getting recommendations from social platforms. Google’s own social platform Google+ is already getting a lot of attention from bloggers, search engine experts and marketers. Search Engine Optimization services providers will evolve into community builders. Most SEO services provider currently offer full fledged social web marketing services. However, the emphasis would be on building more interactive social communities around the content of a website. I think SEO industry is already heading in the right direction.

There are few things that I don’t understand yet. Like:

• If this is how search results will get generated, doesn’t this mean that I will get to see only a few limited sites in my search results?
• Wouldn’t it limit a user’s reach to high quality content from sources other than those that they are more likely to interact with?
• How small content publishers and bloggers would be able to compete with large publishers with stronger brand images and huge social media interactions?

1. Suggest Friends and Contacts:
Google+ should have a feature to suggest contacts and introduce people to each other. Right now, this can be done by using huddle, or simply tagging people in a status. But it would be awesome if it was clearer and easier.

2. Joining or Subscribing to a Circle
As Darren Rowse suggested, there should be a way for people to add themselves into one or many of the circles, offered to them by another Google Plus user. This way they can subscribe to updates addressed to that specific circle and wouldn’t be bothered by other things. This will also help people with thousands of followers to speak a selected audience.

3. Improved People Search
There should be search options to find people by age, location, interests, etc. Right now, it seems like the search bar on the top allows you to search for people by name. What if I wanted to find people who are in my city, and interested in poetry reading? Advanced search options would allow more people to connect to each other, increasing the overall network size and interactivity on their accounts and Google+.

4. Chat in One tab:
When I have my Google Plus stream opened in one tab and Gmail in other, I have two tabs showing chat in the sidebar. When someone initiates a chat, a window pops up in every G+ and Gmail tab. I think Google plus and Gmail should ask me where I want to chat, on G+, Gmail, both or none.

5. Who are The People in ‘Find and Invite’?
G+ team should explain to us how they display people they think we might want to add to our circles (Update: I later found out that Google+ does explain how it suggests people). It will help us understand, how we can appear in more people’s suggestions. It will also help us understand why we see so many people that have nothing in common with us. Youtube does a similar thing with suggested viewing feature. It describes that it is recommending a particular video because I watched a similar video, and it also tells which similar video I viewed.

6. Integrate Other Networks into Stream using APIs
We all know that the work is in progress to release an API for G+ which will allow developers to integrate apps into Google+. Currently Google is offering a mailing list where Developers can sign up to get notified whenever there are opportunities available for them. Hopefully with this API release, we will be able to see our Facebook, Twitter and other social networks right into our G+ stream.

7. WordPress Integration and Comments
Hopefully, with the API release, it will become possible to integrate Google plus into WordPress. Every comment I post on a Blogger or WordPress blog should appear on my stream with a link back to original post. This means that I will carry my discussions with me to my stream. It would be awesome if we could also receive notifications for new comments on that blog post. People should not only be able to +1 a blog post or page on a website but they should also be able to +1 a comment posted by someone anywhere on the web.

Google needs to provide tools that make a WordPress blog and commenting system get totally integrated. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg recently talked about how he would like to see G+ integrated into WordPress. WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS used by millions of people. It will provide a great boost to Google+ and in return G+ will provide traffic to the websites running a G+ integrated WordPress website..

8. Allow users to suggest improvements in Find and Invite
Find and Invite shows suggestions there should be a feature to allow users to remove a profile from the suggestions. There are lots of people in there that I don’t want to add. Removing them will improve Google’s algorithms and they would be able to understand more about what I like. Isn’t this the whole purpose of G+?

These were just the few features that came to my mind, I am sure more ideas will keep coming to the minds of all Google Plus users. Many of them have already suggested similar feature requests using the feedback form. The thing that I am curious to know is how we will be using Google Plus in the future. How it will help people make money, build networks, become influential. What are the features that would make Google plus more useful for everyone?

Smartphone:

A smart phone is a mobile phone with more computing power, Internet capabilities, multimedia enabled by camera phone and media players. A smartphone performs most tasks performed by a low end phone and it can also work as a portable digital assistant, a GPRS device, an Internet enabled device connection to the Internet via wi-fi or other options. These smartphones run on operating systems designed for mobile devices in general and mobile phones in particular.

iPhone:

iPhone is a smart phone designed and manufactured by Apple Inc. iPhone runs on iOS, an operating system designed by Apple to be used in the mobile devices manufactured by Apple.

iPad:

iPad is a tablet computing device designed and developed by Apple. It also runs on iOS, the operating system behind iPhone. iPad is considered to be a computing device designed to play multimedia files, browse the internet, or reading books. However, it can also be used for other purposes. It looks like a slate, with an on screen keyboard.

Android:

Android itself is not a smart phone, instead it is an open source Operating System designed for mobile devices. Google Inc. acquired the company that started the project, and since then Google is cooperating with the open source community on the development of Android. Google also collaborated with mobile device manufacturers such as Samsung, HTC and many others to release smart phones and other devices that run on Android operating system.

What are Apps?

Apps is a short term used for applications or programs written and designed to run on specific platforms. Apple has their own App Store where users of iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad can download free and paid applications for their devices. Similarly, Android also has an online store called “Android Market” where users of devices running on Android can download applications.

I have also made a small presentation explaining the difference. If you find this helpful please share this post with friends.

• What is wrong with Google+ ?
• Why it is not a threat to Facebook as yet?
• What Google is trying to do?

Google has tried to launch social web platforms but all these attempts did not succeed to capture any significant share of the social web. Google Buzz is integrated right into Gmail, but still it did not gain the popularity Google expected, and we all remember Orkut.

Google+ is in trial phase right now and not open for all yet. There might be many improvements to it before it becomes available to all. Right now, it has features similar to Facebook but not all Facebook features are there. For example, there are no ‘Pages’, or ‘Groups’ yet. Even though Google has the technology to add these features by integrating Google Sites and Google Groups. Google+ has chat similar to Gmail Chat and ‘Hangouts’, which allows you to video and voice conference with your friends and family. Sparks are search results for your favorite topics from across the web. Except ‘Hangouts’, there is nothing unique to Google+.

In the User Interface area we see typical Google simplicity with some intuitive new ways to do things on Google+. Such as drag and drop your contacts in circles, and lots of cool nifty things that make it really interesting. However, there are a few things that make this UI a little difficult to understand for non-tech average Joes.

• Google should use improved typography. Can’t understand their obsession with large fonts and fear of using small but readable fonts.
• Too much empty space wasted in padding, margin and white spaces. This does make Google+ look roomier but it also hides lots of content below the scroll. People don’t like scrolling much. They want to see their updates right away when they sign in.
• The sidebars can be more compact.
• Thumbnails for shared photos and images are too large.
• Stream’s status box should be more inviting and a little wider.

Why would people want to sign up for Google Plus?

Google is the search giant, they have tools and resources to improve Google+ into something you can’t live without. For example they have already integrated social search. When you search for a keyword that has a result which one of the people in your social connections shared, Google would highlight this result. Google’s +1 works as Facebook’s ‘Like’, except that it shows your “like” or +1 as a count to the world and as a recommendation to people in your social circle. And by social circle I don’t mean people in your Google+ circles. Your social connections are people who are connected to you on any websites you have mentioned in your Google profile.

If you mentioned your facebook ID, Twitter account, or LinkedIn profile then Google will attempt to follow your social connections from there. It not only tracks your direct contacts from Gmail Contacts, facebook, Twitter and many other websites. It will also consider other people connected to you if you have a mutual friend with them. This increases your social pool significantly, mine has nearly 2000 people. You can see your social connections by visiting your Google Dashboard.

Google+ will help Google create a social platform one what is already its most strong selling point, Google Search. With Google+, +1 buttons, and many other products, Google will try to guess:

• The result you are most likely to click.
• What your friends like.
• What common interests you and your friends and their friends have.
• How often you search for content related to your interests
• And so much more.

Google will use this information to improve their products as mentioned in their TOS, and one of their products is Google Ads.

Google is not trying to beat Facebook on the social web, not yet at least. They are trying to gather a wealth of information which will generate billions of dollars in revenue. In fact, I am hoping that Google will allow Google+ users to directly post from Facebook, Twitter or any other website to their Google+ Stream. Google has already integrated +1 in search results and they are marketing it furiously across the web, asking webmasters to implement it on their websites along with other social sharing buttons.

What all this means?

• For people concerned about privacy, Google knows your social connections, they know your friends, family and acquaintances, bosses, colleagues and how often you communicate with each one of them.
• For other people, your information will be used to enhance search results, and you will be surprised how much relevant these results are going to be in near future.
• For businesses, you will have to hire a lot of people to make sure your business is connected to a lot of people. More time and money needs to be invested on social marketing. Forget your page rank, count how many people you have connected on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, and how often they +1, click, like, comment or react to the content posted by your business.
• For Search Engine Optimizers, forget link building and build links to people, that’s new direction for the web.
]]> http://easy-life.sabza.org/2011/07/google-plus-is-not-facebook/feed/ 1 http://easy-life.sabza.org/2010/09/some-cool-facebook-applications/ http://easy-life.sabza.org/2010/09/some-cool-facebook-applications/#comments Fri, 17 Sep 2010 17:03:57 +0000 Noumaan Yaqoob http://easy-life.sabza.org/?p=272 If you are free and want to have some fun on Facebook, no updates and notifications appearing from your friends. You just have to login to Facebook and you can enjoy some of these applications. Here I have some interesting applications for time killing and have fun with your friends.

These are my favorite applications which I mostly use on Facebook. If you don’t like any of them or you have any suggestions; feel free to tell me about your favorite Facebook applications in the comment box below.

1 – Quiz Planet
It’s not easy to make an application through Facebook application maker. Quiz planet is an application that allows you to make your own quiz and turn this quiz into real Facebook application. It’s really easy and fun Application.

2 – iHeart
Expressing your interest, love and emotions is more complicated on the internet. Sometimes you lack the words to express your feelings. For such times there is a Facebook application called iHeart. This application is used for sending your friends and loved ones some cool gifts with lots of love. Just Pick a heart from this Application and send it to your loved ones and friends.

3 – Social Buzz
This application is based on a very simple yet very fun idea. It asks you questions about your friends. It’s really fun using this application as it asks tricky questions about your friends and you have to answer it.

4 – Birthday Cards
In this application you can send your friends cards and gifts for their birthdays. You can also customize any card as you want to do. Manage your birthday calendar and you can also set reminders for reminding your friends and loved ones birthdays.

5 – Social Interview
Social Interview asks you questions about your life and your friends. This is interesting as it allows you to look into yourself and think about your friends from different perspective.

]]> http://easy-life.sabza.org/2010/09/some-cool-facebook-applications/feed/ 0 http://easy-life.sabza.org/2010/09/ffmpeg-gui-windows-video-converter-free/ http://easy-life.sabza.org/2010/09/ffmpeg-gui-windows-video-converter-free/#comments Mon, 13 Sep 2010 12:19:56 +0000 Noumaan Yaqoob http://easy-life.sabza.org/?p=266 FFmpeg is a popular command line utility, commonly used to convert media files from one format to another. However most home users are not very comfortable using command line tools. This is why there are many Graphical user interfaces available for FFmpeg. It is a cross platform application so it can be used on almost any modern operating system including Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

Though there are many FFmpeg Frontend GUI applications available for free to be used with Windows OS. But I will review two most easy to use and very powerful tools. WinFF and Avanti.

WinFF – FFmpeg based Free Video Converter

WinFF is probably the most easy to use video conversion utility I have ever used on Windows. It is basically a simple FFmpeg GUI with a very simple but intutive user interface.

Usage:
Pressing the Add button you can add a file you want to convert. Then in the Output details you select the format you want to convert this file to, device preset and destination folder. Device preset allows you to set quality parameters for the converted video, you can define where you want to use this converted file for example you can choose web, iphone, mobile, etc. Not all device presets are available for all formats. For example if you want to convert a file to WMV you can not use iphone as the device preset. Clicking on the option button opens the advanced interface where you can set the advanced settings for the conversion.

Support:

WinFF comes with documentation and support forums where you can go to get help if something goes wrong. It is also an open source application released under GNU public license which means you can freely redistribute and share it. It also comes in many languages.

Avanti – FFmpeg frontend for Windows

Avanti is an advanced Audio Video Conversion utility, with a Graphic User Interface for FFmpeg and with the option to insert Avisynth as pre-processor. It gives you more control over selecting the codecs and different parameters of conversion. It has many advanced options and more features than other FFmpeg front-ends. Avanti’s interface might look a little confusing, the installation is also a little complicated and you may not be able to understand few features. But still it is a very powerful tool to convert different media files using FFmpeg.

Avanti Installation:

Once you download the .7z file you will need to download 7-zip compression utility to uncompress the file you just downloaded. Uncompress it to its own folder and then open that folder, there you will see another folder ffmpeg. Since Avanti does not come with FFmpeg you will have to download FFmpeg separately and copy paste the FFmpeg.exe file to this folder. After that go back to main Avanti folder and double click on the file Avanti-Gui. This will open the Avanti interface.


Usage:
In the source file section you can select the file you want to convert. In the Destination Audio Settings and Destination Video Settings you can define how you want to convert this file and into what format and container. For example in the video settings you can select the codec Xvid and container avi. Then click on the Start Process button, if it does not work then you need to press the Start process button again. Avanti also comes with its own help file located in the installation folder. Also you can get more help from videohelp forum’s Avanti thread.

Converting multimedia files into different formats is something that every home user comes across at some point. So your friends and family would really appreciate if you share this post with them on Facebook or twitter.

]]> http://easy-life.sabza.org/2010/09/ffmpeg-gui-windows-video-converter-free/feed/ 0 http://easy-life.sabza.org/2010/09/converting-pdf-to-word-doc-or-editable-text/ http://easy-life.sabza.org/2010/09/converting-pdf-to-word-doc-or-editable-text/#comments Sat, 04 Sep 2010 10:07:49 +0000 Noumaan Yaqoob http://easy-life.sabza.org/?p=253 I recently came across this situation where I had a PDF file containing text which I needed to convert so that I could work on the text. Apparantely it is not as difficult as it sounds. In fact there are some really good free software and online tools available to convert pdf to word, pdf to text format.

There is a downside which is common to most tools available for converting PDF to editable text format. Google Docs and many other programs use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract text from images and pdf files. Now lets suppose you have PDF with text in Hebrew or someother language there is a good chance that OSR technique might not work. However you should still give it a try.

Google Docs
I use Google Docs as my office suite and Google docs can convert PDF files to editable text format. After logging into your Google Docs account click on the upload button. On the upload screen select the pdf file you want to upload and then check the box that says “Convert text from PDF or image files to Google Docs documents”. Start upload and then click on the uploaded file to open it in Google Docs. Remember you may loose some or all the formatting that original PDF file had.

Nitro PDF format to Word or RTF
Nitro PDF to Word is an online tool which claims to be the most accurate PDF to word converter. You simply select the file to upload provide your email address and uncheck the box that says “Receive PDF to Word news from Nitro” or else you will start recieving emails from Nitro software about their products and services.

Open Office
Open Office has built in PDF export feature which allows you to export files created with Open Office to be saved as PDF. Installing Sun PDF Import extension you can also import PDF files to Open Office, edit them and save them in different formats. This method has provided the best results for me. Open Office with this extension tries to import not just the text but also the images and layout of the PDF file.

As I said earlier that most tools will not be able to preserve the original formating and layout of the PDF file. Also note that even though OCR works accurately for most languages using Latin characters, still it is advised that you check the results for spelling mistakes.

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