Problem: You’re sent a Microsoft Publisher .pub file, and need to extract the pictures, for re-use in another publication or academic paper. But the pictures all have Publisher’s fancy border effects applied to them. How to remove these border effects from the pictures in Microsoft Publisher 2013?

Barriers: You right-click on the pictures, but there’s no “Remove all effects” option. You look under Insert | “Borders and Accents”, but there’s no way there to “Remove all effects”. For some reason, perhaps because the file is from an older version of Publisher, the text cannot be copied, pictures cannot be moved or changed, and the file can’t even be re-saved. The file did not become read-only in the transfer. You remember that you probably need to activate the Pictures tab in MS Publisher 2013, which is normally hidden, and only shows up in certain activity states. But you can’t get to that Pictures tab. Nor can you save out a portable assets pack from the .pub file.

Solution 1: Download and install the free Libre Office suite, a fork of Open Office. The Draw module in this opens Microsoft Publisher files. Open the .pub in Libre Office, and extract the pictures. Didn’t work for me — Libre couldn’t even open the file.

Solution 2: Save a .pdf from the .pub. Then use Adobe Acrobat (the full version, not the free Reader) and its Tools sidebar option to ‘Save all images…’ from the .pdf. That’s the images on the pages, not images of the pages. This worked for me, for all but those images that had a sort of ‘ice crystals’ or ‘grunge-dotted’ border applied to them by Publisher.

A useful tip for those who moderate a Facebook group. Search of the group’s posts is case-sensitive. Searching for “acrylic” won’t find “Acrylic”, for instance.

The new update to the posting UI at Scoop.it has killed Scoop.it for me, in the Firefox Web browser. The new posting form just never loads in Firefox — and I have AdBlock and NoScript disabled at Scoop.it. The old Scoop.it browser bookmarklet has never worked for me in Firefox, so I can’t use that either.

In the Google Chrome browser, the Scoop.it post interface does appear, but the control graphics for it mysteriously fail to load, and there’s no snippet of text from the article being shown either…

Why do great Web services (Flickr, etc) feel compelled to ruin themselves by allowing idiot Web designers to mess around with what works and what people are familiar with, thus forcing many veteran users to look seriously at alternatives? If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

Anyway, here’s my functioning workaround for Firefox users who want to continue using Scoop.it:—

1. Install the AddThis addon in Firefox, and set it to use a right-click option (otherwise it will clutter the screen with its additional bookmarks bar, ugh…) and than also set AddThis to reference Scoop.it. You don’t have to give AddThis your log-on details at Scoop.it.

2. On right-clicking anywhere on a Web page you want to Scoop you can now select “Scoop.it”, thus…

3. This will take you to a Scoop.it posting page that actually works in Firefox, but is cramped inside a phone/tablet-sized box. So click the enlarge icon…

4. A new window will then load, and the new Scoop.it posting interface will display fine in Firefox.

It does so with an URL of http://www.scoop.it/bookmarklet?childWindow=1 — thus proving that it wasn’t my Web browser’s addons or blockers that were preventing the posting form from loading in a standard Firefox page. Presumably the initial problem was down to the new posting UI’s interaction with other page elements.

There appears to be a new type of annoying animated .GIF on Twitter, a type which this morning somehow managing to get into my totally locked-down and text-only Twitter keyword-search stream.

Currently being used in the wild by Russian Kickstarter spammers and others…

This type of animation was appearing in my search stream despite my having all animated .GIF loading turned off at the browser-root (via Firefox’s about:config control-panel). It seems to have multiple fall-backs, to things like .MP4 and HTML5 video and even static .JPG. Thankfully I have Flash uninstalled, so there’s no fallback to that. I guess that either the .MP4 or the HTML5 loading was bypassing the AdBlock methods I use to block all images posted to Twitter, and also my video-loading blockers.

It’s also armoured against selective page-element blockers, because it has multiple top-layers containing fiddly video controls and buttons. This means that (for Firefox users who use the add-ons AdBlock Plus + Element Hiding Helper for AdBlock Plus to block this sort of page-junk) it’s incredibly difficult to remove via the usual “Select an Element to Hide…” method.

Instead, I had success with right-clicking on the animation itself, selecting the AdBlock option there, then setting the following option as a global block with a * wildcard…

||twitter.com/i/videos/tweet/*

And once that was done, my stream was once again super-easy to quickly scan-by-eye for those few links to genuinely useful content…

How to use MS Excel 2007 to split a long column or list into smaller chunks, for later batch processing:

Real world scenarios: You have a simple but huge list that you want to parcel/email out in equal portions to various project participants. Or you are working with an old form-based system that can only process X amount of items at a time.

1. Get the excellent free ASAP Utilities plugin, install it in Excel. Note that you may need to enable it before its tab will appear (Top-left orb | Excel Options | Add-ins | Disabled Applications | ASAP + Go | Enable ASAP | OK)

2. Open a new sheet and paste your long list down into a single column.

3. In your new ASAP Utilities tab, click the Select button.

4. ASAP’s Columns and Rows | Select gives you a list of choices before it runs. Choose option 2 (“Conditional Row and Column Select…”) and then use the dialog box that appears. Here I’ve opted to have ASAP tell Excel to select every 25th cell…

No ‘Select’ button? Go: Options | Find and Run a Utility | Type ‘Select’ | Scroll down to “Conditional Row and Column Select…”.

5. Run Select, then exit the dialog box. The cells won’t immediately look like they’ve been selected. But if you Ctrl + C to copy them, then the familiar “marching ants” will reassuringly appear around the selected cells.

6. Now right-click your mouse anywhere inside your new group of selected of cells, and choose ASAP Utilities | option 18 “Insert before and/or after each cell in your selection…” In this new dialog choose “Insert after” and type {lf} to add a new blank line inside each of your selected cells.

7. Run the Insert process. It may take a minute to run, on a long list. Each selected cell will be given a double height by adding a line-break, thus…

If you just need to print out an Excel spreadsheet with each list-chunk separated by a space, perhaps so that your manager can easily read through the list in printed form, then you can leave the process there.

8. Some may now want to go further. When the whole column is selected and copied out to Notepad, you will see that the 25th, 50th, 75th etc cell will appear in quote marks “”, thus…

item 24
“item 25”
item 26

That’s kind of useful, but not really — since the primitive Notepad can’t handle multi-line search/replace.

However, simply paste the same list into the free open-source Notepad++ and the list copies as…

item 24
“item 25
”
item 26

9. That’s perfect. So now we just use Notepad++ to search all the “ occurrences and replace them with blanks. Then we have our list in chunks of 25 — each nicely separated by a blank line.

10. The neatly chunked list can now be pasted back into Excel, adding real blank cells between each chunked section. You might then add a comma to each blank cell, thus giving a basic comma-delimited .csv file for use with automated mailing-list software and similar.

Or the list can simply be saved out of Notepad++ as a plain .txt list, to work with manually — in clearly defined batches of 25 at a time.

facebookGroupArchive…

A [2015] tool to allow someone to archive a Facebook group and then provide a searchable API for the archive.”

Note that Facebook’s own option of: Settings | “Download a copy of your Facebook data” doesn’t include an archive of Groups you admin/moderate.

I did a quick experiment in making a Custom Search Engine via DuckDuckGo‘s link-chaining feature. In this experiment I enable a search across a small group of reputable crowdfunding services, via this search in DuckDuckGo. The search format is…

"open access" site:patreon.com,gofundme.com,peerbackers.com,mysherpas.com,wedidthis.org.uk,crowdcube.com,cofundos.org,indiegogo.com,rockethub.com,kickstarter.com

Works fine. WordPress.com refuses to embed an active link that contains “a phrase” (it’s the inverted commas, presumably), but this test link should work.

Unfortunately chaining a list of URLs appears to turn off DuckDuckGo’s intitle: search modifier, at least when searching for a phrase. But intitle: does work when using a single keyword, in a search such as…

intitle:journal "open access" site:patreon.com,gofundme.com,peerbackers.com,mysherpas.com,wedidthis.org.uk,crowdcube.com,cofundos.org,indiegogo.com,rockethub.com,kickstarter.com

A keyword / phrase that veers more into popular culture (such as Lovecraft) seems to cause Kickstarter results to swamp the search results.

I also noted that the search results from the above example fail to distinguish between “open access” and “open-access”. Adding +, as in +”open access”, fails to force a verbatim search. There is obviously some slight wiggle-room in DuckDuckGo’s claim that they don’t try to second-guess your search terms. Google has the same problem with a verbatim that is-not-really-verbatim.

There’s no sort-by-date filter on the search results, and adding the search modifier sort:date to the search causes a chained-URLs search to totally fail.

Sadly a list of chained URLs just doesn’t work with DuckDuckGo’s Image Search. For instance, a searcher can’t constrain Image Search thus…

"cute cat" site:flickr.com,deviantart.com,commons.wikimedia.org

When looking for Creative Commons images using DuckDuckGo Image Search a better strategy is probably simply to dispense with the URL chain and use this…

"cute cat" "some rights reserved" OR "cute cat" commons attribution -noncommercial

This will still pick up “noncommercial” CC pictures on Flickr (since Flickr obfuscates the picture’s license behind a “some rights reserved” generality), but at least you’d be headed in the right direction. Note that it seems that DuckDuckGo only lets you use a single minus sign to knock out one keyword from the search, and it has to be at the end of the search to work.

A “Region” filter doesn’t appear to work on Image Search. You can’t just see the “cute cats” of Japan, for instance.