Wordle - visualise text based data

Have you ever had data and wished you could display it in a more interesting way than the usual pie or bar chart? If the data isn't numbers but words or text then it's not easy either! There's a simple website called Wordle (www.wordle.net) where you can copy/paste words and it'll make a word image with them - sometimes called a "word cloud". The word that appears most in your list will be biggest. The word that appears less will be smaller. Instantly you can see which is more popular from a list of words. OK, enough words here and let's see an example:

I went to CNET and found the smartphone market share figures for the 3rd quarter of 2012:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57544131-94/android-beats-ios-5-to-1-in-q3-smartphone-market-share/ [accessed 28/11/2012]

I added the figures into Worlde's Advanced page like this:

As you can see above, you can write text, a colon, followed with percentages or any comparative numbers. The above are percentage of market share by smartphone operating system. Here's what Wordle made of these figures:

Maybe it wasn't the best example because Android has a huge 75% of the market and poor Windows Phone at the other end of the scale has only 2% so you can hardly see it (it's above the "o" in Android).

But can you see the potential? Of course the more data you put in the more dense the resulting graphic will be. You can also change the layout and direction of the text in the final image. The colour and font can also be changed. It gives you the possibility of expressing textual data in an interesting way. In the above example it's so obvious that Android has the biggest market share, you don't need to know any numbers, you can tell by the size of the word Android. Extremely visual!

Try it for yourself at www.wordle.net

FastStone Image Viewer

If you need to change the brightness or crop a photo there's a lot of choice for programs. Of course PhotoShop and similar are available but you need to buy them and perhaps you'd prefer something smaller and quicker? 

Lately I've been using FastStone Image Viewer and I've been impressed. It's free, small and fast. There's even a version you can use directly from a USB flash drive without installing it - perfect for taking with you where ever you go. 

It loads quickly and you can browse through photos easily. Double click an image and it'll go full screen. Move the pointer to the edges of the screen for options. Those options are also available from the main window too. What a lot of options it has!

The crop tool is one of my favourites, it does something that every crop tool should do and it does it very simply (take note Adobe!). It gives you the option of selecting standard sizes such as 1024x768 and ratios like 1:1, 3:2, 16:9, etc. This is very useful, especially if you are preparing images for use on an electronic photo frame or for printing to 6x4" photo paper for example. 

You can resize photos and there's even an e-mail feature that will prompt you to resize before sending. There are batch functions too; rename multiple files at once or convert a number of files to a different format. There are a few more unexpected features, one I really like, it's called Image Strip Builder. The image below was made with this feature:

You can quickly add several photos together in a horizontal or vertical strip. This could be useful for web design for example. 

OK, none of its features are ground breaking but it is nice to have in a product that calls itself an image viewer. This is the most impressive thing about FastStone Image Viewer, it's much more. I haven't listed even half the features of this software here so please go and try it for yourself. Even if you are a PhotoShop guru I'm sure you'll find this program useful for those moments you need to do something simple and fast. 

FastStone Image Viewer can be found here:

www.faststone.org

Recommended: 9/10

Word 2010 - can't get rid of grey square brackets?

Do you have a Word document that has grey square brackets [ ] in it that you can't delete no matter what you do? See the word "engraved" in the example opposite.

Those grey square brackets [ ] are bookmarks. Possibly they were created automatically when you copy/pasted from another application? Or maybe you added bookmarks yourself but are wondering why the  grey brackets are there?

Assuming you'd rather not see the grey square brackets, there are two possible solutions, either delete or hide the bookmarks:


Review/Delete Bookmarks
To review and/or delete bookmarks, in Word 2010 click Insert | Bookmarks. A list of bookmarks will appear, select one and click Delete to remove it.


Show/Hide Bookmarks
To show/hide bookmarks, click File | Options | Advanced | Show bookmarks - as shown below: