If you’re suffering from withdrawal symptoms and missing the classic menu for Office, you’re not alone. For a company that normally puts backward compatibility at a premium, Microsoft sure got it wrong with Office 2007 and it’s successor Office 2010.

All the familiar menus you’ve grown to love or hate have disappeared and in their place is a new – supposedly better – system that would be fine if you were just learning to use Office but turns the air blue if you’re used to things being where they always have been.

Unusually there’s no option to switch back to the classic menu for Office. But fortunately there’s an add-on available which puts all your old, familiar menus back into your sparkling new copy of Office. Phew!

It saves headaches and relearning/retraining costs…

Which leaves you yearning for Classic Menu for Office

There’s actually not much to review about Classic Menu for Office.

It does exactly what it sets out to do (and, in my opinion, what Microsoft should have done anyway):

It adds back all your familiar menus and gets rid of that horrible looking, awkward to use, ribbon menu where even the simplest of tasks are buried somewhere completely counter-intuitive.

It saves all the hassle of wondering where all the shortcuts have moved to. So if you’re wondering where simple things that you use in Office every day have moved to, it’s a simple matter of installing the classic menu for Office and not having to go through all the re-learning.

So if you value your sanity but need to keep up with the times then:

Click here to download Classic Menu for Office.

Google recently seem to have a habit of adding new “exciting” features to their search results with so much as asking their users first.

The latest in this barrage of maybe helpful/almost certainly irritating ideas is the search preview. The little magnifying glass that pops up a preview of the website whenever you move your mouse even vaguely close to it.

So, if that bugs you and you’re perfectly happy clicking on the results link to see what the page looks like (and more importantly, says), what can you do?

The easiest option is to change your default search engine. Bing and Yahoo aren’t much different from Google in the results they deliver. And with Internet Explorer or Chrome, that’s probably the only option you’ve got. Google think this new feature is so cool, they don’t give you the option to permanently get rid of it.

If you use Firefox, there’s another option. It’s a bit of a pain to set up but once you’ve done it, those annoying search previews are banished forever. So you’re only waiting for the next “let’s see how much we can irritate our customers” feature that Google decides you absolutely must have.

Go to the Tools menu in Firefox and select the Add-ons option.

Click the button that says “Get Add-ons” and in the search box, enter:

AdBlock Plus

Select it and allow Firefox to install it. I also allowed Firefox to restart as soon as it was installed – not sure if that’s absolutely necessary but the second Add-on you need uses AdBlock Plus so better safe than sorry.

Once you’ve done that the other Add-on you need is:

Element Hiding Helper for AdBlock Plus

(I haven’t put links in for these as in the past I’ve found that links to Add-ons change over time as new versions appear, so it’s just easier to let Firefox handle all that).

Again, restart Firefox.

Then get up a Google search. Press Ctrl-Shift-K and hover over anything you find annoying such as the new “helpful” search preview feature. Click on it – I had to make sure it was only the magnifying glass, not the whole of the search result that was highlighted, which might explain why the darned preview thing was popping up whenever I breathed.

Press “Add Element Hiding Rule” from the menu that appears and you’re done. Back to search results as you expected them to be before some over-eager boffin thought otherwise.

If you’re looking for some software to run your affiliate program, chances are that you’ll have come across iDevAffiliate.

iDevAffiliate is software that you usually install on your own web server (the most economical way) or if your hosting setup is a pain in the neck then you can use their hosting solution.

The iDevAffiliate software is well supported and comes with a year’s worth of upgrades included in the price. Support is by email or – if that can’t resolve an issue – then it gets escalated to phone support. The email support is responsive and helpful.

So, what can iDevAffiliate do for you?

The quick answer is that iDevAffiliate can completely run your affiliate program for you.

You’ll need to set things up – it’s not like Clickbank where you sign up for an account, wait for approval and get issued with a hoplink to give to affiliates. iDevAffiliate is much more flexible than that.

You can use near enough any payment system in existence. There’s a whole list on their site of systems that are supported “off the shelf” and there are ways of integrating near enough any other system. So whether you’re using PayPal, Google Checkout, E-Junkie, 2CheckOut or a shed load of other payment processors, you should be covered.

iDevAffiliate also integrates with near enough any shopping cart from free systems such as Zen Cart through to other options such as 1ShoppingCart and AMember. So if you’ve spent time and effort getting your shopping cart up and running and now want to add an affiliate program, iDevAffiliate is definitely a system to look at.

Payments are completely customisable. You can pay a fixed amount per sale or a percentage. You can pay affiliates per sale or per lead. And you can pay them once or on a recurring basis.

You can choose to offer a tiered commission system so that affiliates get commission for other affiliates they introduce. Just make sure that you stay within the terms of service of companies like PayPal who aren’t fans of that idea.

iDevAffiliate also lets you offer higher payouts to affiliates who introduce lots of business to you.

Setting up iDevAffiliate is straightforward but it’s worth going through all the settings and making sure that they are all correct. You’ll need to allow yourself some time to do this.

Installing iDevAffiliate on 1&1 hosting

One problem I encountered installing the software is that that it is protected by ionCube. It’s not a problem if your host supports that (most do) but I happen to use 1&1 for the hosting that I wanted to run iDevAffilliate on and 1&1′s hosting is non-standard (to put it nicely). In common with most of the sites I found, the instructions 1&1 give for loading ionCube are out of date – they refer to a file called ioncube-loader-helper.php that does not get installed in the standard installation and doesn’t come with the latest downloads either. This seems to have been replaced by a file called loader-wizard.php which is invaluable in identifying problems – just upload it to the problem folder and run it. It will then tell you why ionCube isn’t working in that folder and what you need to do to fix the problem.

1&1 require you to create a file called php.ini and place this in the root folder of your domain. On 1&1 hosting the iDevAffiliate installation needs this php.ini file in any folder that runs the program files – the main directory, install directory, etc. Essentially anywhere you get an error message. Once I got over that issue with the help of 1&1 support and the loader-wizard.php file, all was well.

Overall verdict

iDevAffiliate is a cheap but highly flexible way to run an affiliate program. It will do all the laborious background work of checking affiliate sales and it will run the processes necessary to pay out affiliates, including creating a PayPal mass payment file if you want it to. It’s well supported – tech support is fast and helpful.

You can check out all its features before you buy with the online demo and they also answer any pre-sales questions you may have promptly as well.

Click here to take a look further at iDevAffiliate.

The Club Membership Software program is a simple software program to help club secretaries and anyone else who wants to keep an organized contact list.

Installation of the club membership software is straightforward: you download a zipped file, extract it to somewhere you’ll remember and then run the Setup program.

The club membership software program has been around in various forms since the 1990′s. If you have an earlier version (even if it’s a DOS one – some clubs use hand-me-down computers), there is a conversion routine that will convert your data into the latest format. There is also a conversion routine to import data from a range of other formats, so you shouldn’t need to re-type any existing data.

What does this Club Membership software do?

When you first run the program, you are given a list of options that you may want to set. These include missing out some of the data fields so that you are less likely to make errors when entering your member’s details. There are also options to set up most of the default program settings as well as renaming any data fields to be more meaningful.

Helpfully the club membership software capitalizes words for you, so if you’re not a proficient typist (or if you’re just a lazy typist), it will take care of capitalizing words. It will cope with Mc’s as well to an extent and if it guesses things wrong, you just overtype and it will remember. This kind of attention to detail is handy, especially as it’s likely that the program won’t be used as often as, say, your web browser.

You can list your club members from the report button.

This brings up a screen that allows you to narrow down your membership list by a variety of criteria as well as other things for the report orders.

Club Membership software shows all reports on screen in your standard web browser. This takes a little bit of getting used to at first but is actually quite sensible. Every computer nowadays has a web browser and this means that the program can make use of it for any printed reports. You could also take the files that the program outputs and place them straight onto your website, probably in a protected members area.

Club Membership software also allows you to bulk email your club’s members. You’ll need to find a few details to allow it to connect to your internet service provider – these are the same ones your email program uses.

If you’re thinking that this means the program could be used for bulk emailing purposes such as spamming, this isn’t likely as the software insists on other details being entered rather than just email addresses. And, anyway, spammers wouldn’t want to enter one email address at a time.

The program knows that most internet service providers nowadays place a limit on the number of emails you can send in any given time and allows you to place a delay between each message sent.

All in all, Club Membership software is an easy to use program that does exactly what it sets out to do. There is also the option of a 30 day trial so that you can check that it meets your exact needs.

Click here to download a trial copy of Club Membership software here.

With the economy still in the doldrums, kitchen remodeling is something that a lot of people are considering.

The first question is whether to use a professional or go down the self-installation route. As you may have guessed from the title, Ikea Kitchen Remodeling Secrets chooses the second route.

More about Kitchen Remodeling Secrets

Doing a kitchen remodeling sounds daunting but it’s actually one of the easier domestic remodeling projects you can indulge in.

Of course, you need to be able to plan everything and design it correctly. This report covers the process in detail. It documents the process from start to finish, which will save you from hiring in one of Ikea’s recommended teams to do the job.

Flatpack kitchen units are much the same as other kit-form furniture: if you follow the instructions to the letter, they work well. If you mess up, you’re in trouble. The potential pitfalls are covered well and you’re shown how the author managed to complete the project in record time and with minimal disruption. There are even instructions on how to assemble the units and these are better than the ones that come in the actual Ikea packs themselves.

Having suffered missing parts on more than one occasion, I found the section on avoiding lost or missing parts of the delivery invaluable. There’s nothing worse with self assembly furniture than finding that one (always vital) piece is missing from the equation – this section alone is worth the price of the report in saved time and frustration.

There’s also a section on how to phase your kitchen remodeling project. Since the kitchen is one of the most important and well-used rooms in the house nowadays, this advice is definitely extremely useful.

All in all, the Ikea Kitchen Remodeling Secrets report does exactly what it sets out to do. It demystifies the process of installing your own kitchen and sets the process out in easy to follow steps.

Click here to get Ikea Kitchen Remodeling Secrets.

It’s is a great program so long as you know how to use Excel. You can use it for all sorts of things, well beyond the original idea of a spreadsheet.

But this power has a problem associated with it: learning how to use Excel beyond the basics isn’t easy.

Even if you consider yourself a power user, chances are that you’ll learn new tips and tricks in How to Use Excel.

More about How to Use Excel

The How to Use Excel tutorial comes in PDF format, which makes searching a lot easier than flicking through a printed index and hoping that you and the book’s author agree on terminology.

If you’re not sure about some of the basic aspects of Excel, these are covered but the main emphasis is on speed of use.

If you’re using a program such as Excel on a regular basis, you’ll know that there are a handful of things that you use near enough all the time. And it’s here that this tutorial comes into its own…

As you doubtless know, you can format cells so that they look different and show up nicely on screen. But this tutorial shows you how to format them “on the fly” as you’re typing, without navigating the menu system.

Error trapping is essential when you’re using a spreadsheet. The tutorial talks you through how to use Excel’s built in form capability to streamline this as much as possible.

Another time saving trick lets you easily access different worksheets.

You’re also shown how to set up custom views for your spreadsheets as well as copying styles across workbooks.

All in all, the tutorial is excellent and I discovered an embarrassingly large number of tips and tricks that I didn’t know about Excel and I’ve been using the program to do lots of work over a number of years.

The tutorial covers Excel 2003 and Excel 2007, so whichever version you are using will be covered.

Click here to download your copy of How to use Excel.

Despite the advent of email, there are still times when you need to send or receive a fax and using an internet fax service makes this easy.

The trouble is, nowadays those times aren’t necessarily often enough to justify renting an extra phone line, buying a fax machine and keeping it topped up with paper and ink. Plus you’re not necessarily always near a physical fax machine – there’s probably one at the office but you likely don’t want one at home as well.

Fortunately, you’re not alone with this problem.

There are now companies who offer a virtual fax service.

Choosing an internet fax service

These services offer:

• Fax sending by email, from programs such as Microsoft Word or from a small downloadable program
• Notification of a successful “send”
• Receiving faxes by email
• A dedicated phone number, so no-one need know that you’re using a virtual fax service
• Blocking of junk faxes
• No extra phone line or fax machine needed

The internet fax service from RingCentral is fast, reliable, easy to set up and comes with a 30 day trial so that you can test it out for yourself at no risk.

internet fax service

Click here for a 30 day trial of this internet fax service.

]]> http://helpanswer.com/how-to-send-and-receive-faxes-with-an-internet-fax-service/feed/ 0 http://helpanswer.com/how-to-get-rid-of-foot-odor/ http://helpanswer.com/how-to-get-rid-of-foot-odor/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 14:59:44 +0000 admin http://helpanswer.com/?p=195

Let’s face it, foot odor is embarassing. It’s not something people like to talk about in polite company.

But if you’re unfortunate enough to suffer from smelly feet then it’s worth investigating how to get rid of foot odor.

If you’re like me, you’ll have tried all the over-the-counter foot odor products such as insoles, sprays, powders and the like.

In my case, they kind of tamed the smell but that was as far as it got…

Ways to get rid of foot odor

Insoles were OK for a while but I never quite got the hang of cutting them to size, even with the printed guidelines, which meant that they slipped around my shoes and rucked up, making it uncomfortable to walk at times.

I’ll blame my grandfather for the original smell – apparently his shoes smelt that bad that as soon as he took them off, the cat took them outside and tried to bury them deep in the back garden.

For me, the sprays and powders were kind of OK. In fact, since I hadn’t discovered this report at the time, they’re what I used to tame my feet. But it took around three years for them to fully take effect. A solution – yes. One I’d recommend – no. It took way too long and cost a fortune as I was going through cans and bottles at the rate of one of each a fortnight. That soon adds up to a tidy sum.

So – forgive the pun – Fresh Feet Forever was like a breath of fresh air.

It’s easy to put into practice, taking a couple of minutes a day (actually less time than I was spending before washing my feet and dressing them with all the various potions).

And the other benefit is the cost. The ingredients are cheap – much the same as a can of Scholl spray or powder – and the effect is permanent, so you won’t need the “drug” of forever coating your feet with spray or white powder or both.

Check out this down to earth guide for getting rid of foot odor here.

The 10 Day Ebook promises to get your ebook from idea to published and earning money in 10 days.

Is that possible?

Surprisingly, the answer is yes. With the proviso that you shouldn’t be a perfectionist and that you don’t let yourself suffer from too much analysis.

I’ve read quite a few different products similar to the 10 Day Ebook that claim to be able to get your ebook written and published in record time but this is the first one I’ve felt confident enough to actually review.

You’ve probably come across this kind of promise before – computing books that promise you’ll learn scary things like PHP in 24 hours or language books that claim you’ll speak French in a week. In most cases the reality is “dream on”. So it’s refreshing to read something that is actually realistic.

Let’s see what you need to do:

10 Day Ebook steps

Day 1 is research. The book goes into depth about what to look for in terms of number of internet searches, how much competition you should have and more. The recommended tools for checking into this are all free and most are ones I’ve used for research in the past, although a couple of the methods were new to me. Ideally you should research several topics rather than dive straight in with the first idea that takes your fancy. If that’s the case with you, there’s an excellent way to “tie break” between them. All in all, depending on how much keyword research you’ve done before, you should be able to complete day 1 in an hour or two.

Day 2 is where your book starts to take shape. Most authors dread staring at a blank sheet of paper or computer screen and this outlining technique will get over that completely. The outline is key to getting your ebook written fast and involves splitting your prospective ebook first into chapters and then smaller chunks and then even smaller chunks. Depending on how creative you’ve feeling, the outline process will take a few hours but I found my mind was already starting to write an ebook inside my head as I did this part of the process.

Day 3 is set to be a long day. You’ll actually be writing the first draft of your ebook today. Estimated time for this is around 7 hours if you’re aiming for a typical 50 page ebook. The good news is that this won’t be a marathon session typing away until your fingers wear away. Instead you’ll be doing the writing in short bursts so that you’ll always be enthusiastic. If you’re the kind of person who finds days like Sundays boring, aim to make your day 3 a Sunday and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how far you get. Alternatively you could split day 3 into a few smaller sessions. Or you could “cheat” and use a program such as Dragon Naturally Speaking to type your book for you – this isn’t suggested in the book and personally I find programs like Dragon hold me back but a lot of people swear by them. If you don’t like typing it’s a great way to go. And if you’ve got a Windows Vista or Windows 7, you don’t even need to splash out on Dragon – there’s speech recognition software built in.

Day 4 is editing your book. Nick Daws has an interesting take on this and if you like everything to be 100% perfect you’ll almost certainly disagree. But remember that almost nothing is perfect and you can always go back and re-edit later when you’ve got some sales – this could even be a selling point by offering “free upgrades”. The method outlined is one I’ve not come across before but works well and means that you shouldn’t spend more than a few hours editing and polishing your ebook ready for sale.

Day 5 is easy. If you go about it the way that the book suggests, it will take you less than an hour to turn your book into one that’s ready to publish in PDF format (pretty much industry standard for any report on the web). Or you could download a copy of Open Office and use the “print to PDF” option to create your ebook in about the time it takes to read this paragraph. That’s how I do it for any ebooks I create and it works great with hyperlinks that work fine first time.

Day 6 goes through where to publish your ebook, including full instructions for the preferred method if you’re going to publish in electronic form only. Allow about an hour at most to complete day 6.

Day 7 is all about creating your sales letter. This is another part that a lot of people (myself included) dread. Nick Daws has a solid, six step approach that will help you get over any fear you may have of writing a sales letter. He also points you in the direction of some good sales pages that you can model – remember to only do this with your wallet safely locked in another room and your Paypal password blanked from your mind! You’re only using these as models, not as things to buy. So long as you’re not a perfectionist, day 7 should take no more than a few hours.

Day 8 involves setting your sales page up. There are quite a few different options here. Another way, not suggested by Nick, would be Word’s option of  “Save as web page”. Web purists will probably hate me for even suggesting that but it works. Even better would be to use a WordPress blog and the free sales theme available from WordPress Sales Letter Theme. I’m getting lazier nowadays with my web design and to my mind, WordPress is the easiest way to publish content and themes like that take all the hassle of setting up professional looking sales pages. Day 8 also covers registering your domain name and getting hosting. Nick suggests getting your domain name and hosting from the same supplier but I don’t agree with that. Personally, nowadays, I get near enough all my names from Namecheap and my hosting from Hostgator.  Your choice and not a showstopper but those are who I’d go with. There’s also some testing needed on day 8 so depending on how confident you are with the technical stuff, allow anything from 1 to 4 hours to get this sorted. Or find a local web savvy teenager to help you with this stage.

Day 9 is when the fun starts: promoting your brand new ebook. The book covers the two main ways of launching your new ebook and pushes one of those as better for most people, especially if it’s your first project. Sensible advice and if you follow all of it you’ll be set for a good amount of traffic coming to your site. How much time you should devote for promotion is a bit like asking how long is a piece of string but I’d allow several hours at least for this part. The good news is that the more time you spend here, the more sales you’re likely to make.

Day 10 covers getting other people to sell your ebook for you. These are usually called affiliates. The book covers what to pay affiliates (although Nick’s suggested percentage is on the low side to my mind), how to attract them in the first place, getting joint venture partners and several other ways to get your new ebook up and selling. A bit like day 9, the more time you spend on this the higher your rewards are likely to be.

Overall verdict

The 10 day ebook is a comprehensive guide to writing, compiling and selling an ebook. It also comes with a brave guarantee: so long as you follow through on the process shown, the publishers guarantee that you’ll make at least $1,000 a month from your first ebook. Of course this means that you have to get off your backside and actually do something but that’s the same as anything in life. What it does mean is that there’s no real downside so long as you actually go through with things: if following the course doesn’t get you an ebook that earns real money, you get a refund.

10 days is perfectly achievable. Most of those days aren’t full, 8 hour, working days. And if it took you a bit longer you should still be able to get your new ebook written and promoted within a handful of weeks, even if you only spend a couple of hours a day at it. Once it’s written and promoted, it has the potential to earn money with next to no effort for months and years which has got to be good.

Click here to get a copy of the 10 day ebook for instant download.

The Truth About Supplements is a well informed, well researched report on supplements by a fitness instructor called Mark Ottobre. He has seen first hand which supplements work with your body building and which work against it.

The focus of the truth about Supplements report is on bodybuilding but if you take any health supplements – such as amino acid supplements – then it’s an eye opening read. There’s a sample chapter available for free so that you can check both the style and the range of information. The free chapter goes into depth on protein supplements and lists out both essential and non-essential amino acids that you may well have encountered on an ingredients list and wondered what they were.

The main Truth about Supplements report goes into much more detail and also includes Mark’s “Champions Diet” which has been used by a number of top body builders, some of whom are featured on the main page of the Truth about Supplements site.

Even if you don’t want to become a top body builder, it pays to know the effects of the supplements that you are ingesting. Not all supplements are created equal and not all of them help everyone in the same way. This report will help to empower you. And if you’re a cynic who doesn’t often believe advertising hype, it will help you cut through the sales gimmicks that are used to trigger you into buying supplements you either don’t want or don’t need.

Chances are even your own personal trainer doesn’t know much of what’s discussed in this report. So if they have been recommending supplements for you, the report is an easy and informed “second opinion” that you can use before you spend lots of money on a variety of supplements that won’t help you in your fitness goals.

Click here to check out more about the Truth About Supplements.