Did you know that it’s possible to embed an image besides plain text as a comment in a Microsoft Excel cell? Here’s how:

1. Right click on the cell and select Insert Comment
2. Then right click anywhere on the bounding box of the comment and select Format Comment…
3. Go to Colors and Lines tab
4. From the Color dropdown under Fill section, select Fill Effects…
5. Go to Picture tab
6. Click Select Picture… button, browse to and select the picture that you want to insert in the comment. You might want to tick Lock picture aspect ratio before clicking on OK. This (theoretically) ensures that when you resize the comment bounding box, the picture gets sized proprotionately. However, we noticed that this option really didn’t have its intended effect and whether or not it was checked, the end size of the image when the comment box is resized is always the same
7. Press OK once more

There you have it. Play the video below to see this in action.

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How often do you find yourself wanting to search in Google when the active application is not your browser? If you too find that copying the text, switching to browser and searching is tedious, read on.

I use FeedReader a lot and found myself always doing Google searches of text in it a lot by manually copying word(s) and pasting them in the search box of Firefox. So I thought about a way to quickly perform Google searches by simply pressing a hot key (keyboard shortcut) with text selected in whichever windows program it is in. It’s just 4 lines of code using AutoHotKey.

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The IBM mouse that I use at my work place is hard to click. My fingers would get tired at the end of the day with all the clicking. So I requested for a small program or script that will click whenever ‘Ctrl’ key is pressed. jgpaiva over at DonationCoder wrote a 3 line .ahk file that does this.

Here are the steps:

1. Install Auto Hot Key.
2. Save the following as LeftClick.ahk:

   Ctrl::  send,{lbutton}  return

3. Double click on the new .ahk file.

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Auto-raise is a AutoHotKey script that will activate programs in the windows taskbar area by simply hovering your mouse over them. It will also press the minimize windows for you when you hover on the minimize button. To use it, copy the code at the linked page, paste it in a notepad and save it as Auto-raise.ahk in any folder. Now download and install the latest AHK. To start the Auto-raise script, simply double click on the .ahk file. You should see a ‘H’ shaped icon in your system tray. By default the script doesn’t activate minimized windows. Also Start menu is activated upon mouse over.

Since we like to activate minimized windows by hovering the mouse plus since we don’t use Start menu at all, we edited the script (right click on the system tray icon and Edit This Script) and changed

hover_task_min_info = 1 ;
hover_start_button = 1 ;

to

hover_task_min_info = 0 ;
hover_start_button = 0 ;

(1 is true, 0 is false)

Make sure you reload the script after editing, saving and closing it.

Here’s a small video of the script in action:

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