Enable always continuous page display in Adobe Acrobat

If you are reading pdf files, you may have noticed the two different page display modes: single page display and continuous page display. In single page display, when you reach end of page, it automatically jumps to the next page. If you are like me, will feel this is disorienting at best. Even if you set default page display to continuous, at Preferences > Page Display > Default Page Layout, you will notice that not all pdf files will follow this and you will end up, manually changing the mode each time, resulting in diminishing respect for Acrobat. After exhaustive search (well mostly ) I have finally discovered an override setting.

To always enable continuous page display in Adobe Acrobat, go to:
Preferences > Accessibility  and check "Always use Page Layout Style" as "Single Page Continuous".
And enjoy your mind bending control over the pdf files...

Microsoft Word / EndNote slow downs

If you experience serious slow downs/lags while using Word with Endnote, try the following two steps:

1. In Word 2002 (XP)/2003, select Tools / EndNote / Cite While You Write Preferences.
   In Word 2007, go to the "Add-ins" tab and EndNote / Cite While You Write Preferences.
   
   
2. Uncheck the two boxes labeled "Scan for temporary citations" and "Check for citation changes".

Note that this does not disable Instant Formatting or Cite While You Write. It simply alters the way Instant Formatting works so that the functions that trigger the lag issue are not invoked

[ more ]

Side-by-side configuration is incorrect

If you develop a native Windows application with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and try to run it on another machine, you might get an error message complaining about side-by-side configuration is incorrect. The application eventlog (control panel>administrative tools) will reveal that this is related to missing VC90 CRT. So this error message means that your application needs Visual C++ runtime library to function.

Retail version of Visual C++ runtime can be downloaded from Microsoft. Here is the x86 version. On the other hand, the debug version of Visual C++ runtime is not allowed to be distributed due to license issues. So, if you would like to make your application run on a machine without development environment, there are two options.

1) Build your program to statically link the runtime. To do that, in the project property page under "Configuration Properties > C/C++ > Code Generation", change run-time library from "Multi-threaded DLL (/MD)" to "Multi-threaded (/MT)".

2) Build your program to dynamically link the runtime AND install visual c++ redistributable (download link) on the target machine.

Happy coding...

View multiple Excel files at the same

There's a simple setting that allows excel to display multiple files next to or on top of each other (like word, pdf, etc.). This is useful especially if you have two monitors or a large monitor and would like to work on two excel files at the same time.

Here's what you need to do:

Excel 2003: Go to "Tools > Options" Select the “General” tab and place a check mark at “Ignore other Applications”.

Excel 2007: Office Button > Excel Options > Advanced Tab > General Section > "Ignore other Applications that use dynamic data exchange"

Click OK and you are done!.

Also note that there's "side by side comparison" feature of Excel.