Jon Frank’s Weblog

So today I’m reading the September issue of Consumer Reports; which has a big section on online security, ID theft, and security software reviewed. Wow! what an eye opener.

Some take aways:

Criminals are using malware to log on to routers & change their address setting for website. This will send you to a rogue site even when you type in the correct address into your browser.

Social Networking sites are havens for spyware because people who frequent them often drop their guard.

Where does that leave us nonprofits? Not in a good place according to the results of NPower’s Stable & Secure Scan. What’s that, you say? Never heard of it.

NPower Seattle and NPower Indianacreate 12 benchmarks to measure nonprofit’s technology infrastructure. Last year we sent out volunteers to run an assessment, or scan, on Puget Sound nonprofits to see how the measured up against the benchmarks.

Boy has it been insightful. In some ways we’ve come along way but in many others we still have a lot of work to do. And one of those was around security, almost 3/4 of the nonprofits we scanned FAILED the security benchmark.

What does that mean?

• While three quarters of nonprofits in the region have virus protection software installed, only 44% update the definitions daily or weekly.
• Only half of nonprofits in the area believe that their staff members could identify a “phishing” email or instant messaging attempt to acquire sensitive information—such as usernames, passwords and credit card details.
• Only 62% believe that their staff members know what to do if they receive a suspicious email that has a virus attached.  

What can you do? Of course I have some recommendations.

1. If your organization hasn’t already done so, sign up for our Stable & Secure Scan. We’re offering it for free to local nonprofits as part of the United Way’s Day of Caring on September 12th.
2. Attended NPower’s Security for Nonprofits webinar in October.
3. Check out the September issue of Consumer Reports.

Just last week I was conducting a private training for one of the great nonprofits here in Seattle on Excel. Well advanced Excel to be exact. We covered charts, pivots, and filtering. I love the power of pivots, but that’s another story.

It was a good refresher, as always, for me. I use filters are the time but it’s usually the AutoFilter command in Excel. Today I needed to filter some data for a grant that NPower received last year. I had done some training up in Bellingham and needed to know which nonprofits took advantage of the classes we offered. I had a nice spreadsheet with the names & nonprofits of those that attended. So I had the information I needed.

The trick (or difficulty depending on your point of view) was to see each nonprofit only once in my data. I had staff attended multiple classes and multiple people from the same nonprofit come. Now the AutoFilter command would let me filter my data but it doesn’t give the option of having it display unique instances.

That’s where Advanced Filters come in. But again this isn’t an obvious solution. The AdvancedFilters dialog has a checkbox for Unique Records Only. But what criteria do you search for? I wanted all the records. Turns out you don’t, search for criteria that is. It means you use the AdvancedFilter in a different manner than what I show students in our Excel Data Analysis class. Here’s how:

Note: The list must contain a heading, or the first item may be duplicated in the results.

1. Select a cell in the spreadsheet data.
2. From the Data menu, choose Filter, Advanced Filter.(In Excel 2007, click the Data tab on the Ribbon, then click Advanced Filter.)
3. Choose ‘Copy to another location’.
4. For the List range, select the column(s) from which you want to extract the unique values. This is where it differs greatly from what we do in our Excel Data Analysis class. In class we select ALL the data, here you only want to select the column you want the unique records from.
5. Leave the Criteria Range blank.
6. Select a starting cell for the Copy to location.
7. Add a check mark to the Unique records only box.
8. Click OK.

You should get a list of unique records only.

One of the Excel trainings that NPower offers, Excel Data Analysis, covers creating charts & graphs in Excel. Which can be incredible powerful. It’s a great way to highlight your data and make a powerful statement. Jack, our trainer here at NPower, recently discovered a slight limitation with using Excel and certain monitors/graphic cards. Well it was more like one of the students pointed it out to him and provided an answer.

If you have one of the newer wide screen monitors, you may have experienced the following:

You create a great looking chart. However the Y axis title is, …well long. And Excel cuts it off instead of resizing the ‘box’ that the text is in. And you can manually resize it yourself.

Turns out this is an issue with any monitor that can display a greater width to height ratio than 4:3. Microsoft has published a work around; so if this has happened to you, you should check it out. You can find it at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;870698

Now most people that have come to my training classes know I’m a big Photoshop fan. I recently posted about Adobe’s new Photoshop Express, their online version of Photoshop.

Well the folks at Idealware, with TechSoup, just published a review of editing programs call A Few Good Photo Manipulation Tools. They took a look at what’s out there, using some basic criteria of what nonprofits really need these tools for.

I recommend you check it out. And while you’re at it, Microsoft today announced today the launch of their new service - Photosynth. This service allows you to take multiple photos and create a 3D image. It made the Seattle Timespaper today. And it must have been big news because when I went to try and check it out, their site was overwhelmed (their words) and not accessible.

So in the last InDesign class here at NPower I had a student ask about printing options. She had a publication that she printed on 11×17 paper and then folder in half to make a booklet. She created it with the page setup as 11×17 but wanted to know if there wasn’t a way to get InDesign to print the last page & the first page together.

It’s actually more complicated than that, if you set up your document this way. My answer, don’t worry about it. There’s an easier way. And it turns out my answer helped another student who was also creating a similiar document. Only her’s was on Letter size paper that she folded in half.

Set your document up with way your readers are going to see it. Meaning that if each page is 8 1/2 x 11, then set your InDesign document up with the Letter page size.

Under the File menu in InDesign CS3 you’ll find the Print Booklet command. This handy utility will automatically position your pages for you. For example, I set up a document with a page size of Letter (8.5×11) but want to print it on 11×17 and fold it myself.

The Print Booklet command will position the pages for you, putting the last page on the left side of the paper and the 1st page on the right side. Keep in mind though that you have to have a number of finished pages that is divisible by 4. Finished being what it looks like when it’s printed. In the above example each piece of paper will have 4 pages printed on it, 2 on each side. So your final document will need to an even number divisible by 4 or the Print Booklet command will insert black pages at the end.

You can fix this if you need blank pages, because by default InDesign ignores them. Check out the post that InDesignSecrets had this week on how to do that.

If you have an older version of InDesign are you out of luck? Or stuck doing it the manual way? Nope, you can get almost the same thing with InBooklet SE. You can find that option under the file menu with InDesign CS PageMaker Edition or InDesign CS2.

Beth Kanter consistently blows me away. As you know, since you’re reading this blog, that it’s relatively new for me. I started about the beginning of the year. It certainly has been a learning experience and overall great.

One of the Goals I have for this year is for this blog to be successful. As we were reviewing our goals I realized I have no idea what this means! Is it number of readers? Number of posts? What???

Well Beth has a great post all about measuring success and what should it mean. She used a few benchmarks that she got from Avinash Kaushik and measured this year against last year. I haven’t finished ready the whole post yet but what I did read was enough to get me to write this post immediately.

I will be going over it in detail, thinking about how I can use her example to measure the success of my blog.

I guess I’m a little spoiled here at NPower. When I want to meet with my colleagues I use Outlook to check their calendars and schedule a meeting. Simple enough.

Well it’s easy to forget that not everyone works at the same place or has an account on our Exchange server (for Outlook). What happens when, for example, I’m trying to set up a good meeting time with my fellow board members for the nonprofit I’m on the board of?

Usually it’s a string of emails bouncing potential dates & times. You’d think, me being tech savvy, that I would have realized that there are better solutions out there. Tech savvy web-based solutions.

Well thankfully the folks over at LifeHacker, one of the blogs I read daily, gave me that proverbial slap upside my head reminder. They had a post today about 1 of the many web-based meeting options available, which they refer to as a “schedule optimizer”. And they referenced previous posts, which somehow I think I missed, to other options and what they thought of them.

If you’re like me, have commitments outside of work that require you to organize meetings. Or your nonprofit isn’t using an Exchange Server with Outlook. I recommend checking out their post.

And no, I’m not talking about the kind that comes in a can and you can eat. Spam is the bane of our e-communications. And Spammers are getting more and more clever in their attempts to verify that your email address is valid, so they can sell it of course.

Recently I’ve been receiving the following “types” of emails:

It LOOKS like I’ve signed up to get news alerts from CNN, a reputable source. But as in many things on the internet, looks can be deceiving. I most certainly did not sign up for news alerts from CNN (or MSNBC, the other spam that I’ve been getting).

And I most certainly did not click on the conviently provided links; either to the story or to unsubscribe. As that would unlease a flood of new spam into my inbox at best. At worst, and this one turns out to be in that category, my computer would be infected with Malware, Spyware, and other Virus ridden stuff.

I’m certainly going to add this one to NPower’s Security for Nonprofits training.

A couple of times in NPower’s eNewsletters for Nonprofits training I’ve had students want to embed an anchor in their stories. An anchor is a link to another section on the same page. The best, and most common use, is for a list of contents in your enewsletter. This helps guide your readers to stories that are “below the fold”, which means they’d have to scroll down to get to it. And most readers won’t unless you make it super easy for them.

Ideally you wouldn’t do this in Dreamweaver. If you’ve ever taken this class at NPower, you know I strongly encourage nonprofits to use an email service such as Vertical Response. Dreamweaver is fine for creating a template for your enewsletter but not so much for adding the stories. For example, you don’t have a lot of control over the space between your paragraphs. Dreamweaver either gives you a big gap (by hitting Return) or almost no space (by hitting the Return key while holding down the Shift key). That’s it, those are your options (well unless you want to do some hard core coding in HTML).

If you really want to add an anchor in Dreamweaver (perhaps your creating a special HTML email), here’s how you can do it:

*Note: I’m assuming you have your text in place & have created your content list.

1. Click at the beginning of your story
2. Click on the Anchor button at the top of your Dreamweaver screen (make sure you’re on the Common tab)
3. Name your anchor (spelling counts, no spaces or special characters)
4. Go to your contents and select the line for the story
5. In the Properties panel at the bottom of your Dreamweaver screen click in the Links field
6. Type # and then the name of your anchor

That’s it! You’re done.

Boy the more I use Office 2007 the more I like it. Some things are just easier! I know I know, it wasn’t easy to start out with, there is a significant learning curve with the new Office for us long timers.

Recently I re-discovered watermarks. There are all sorts of times when you want to add “Draft” or “Confidential” to your document. Or even a background image of your nonprofits logo. And the 2007 version of Word makes it even easier.

Here’s how you can do it:

1. To to the Page Layout tab on the Ribbon
2. Click on the Watermark button in the Page Background chunk
3. Choose one of the preformatted choices

OR

1. Create your own using the “Custom Watermark” option at the bottom of the menu
2. In the Printed Watermark dialog you can choose to create either a picture watermark or create your own text watermark.