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Welcome back to the podcast! This week’s edition: “Planets, Bullets, and Numbers…Why Can’t We All Just Get Aligned?”
Have you heard? We’re all doomed! You may have even seen the signs. Well, you may have at least some signs being held by some very “out-there” kind of people wandering the streets in front of your favorite coffee house.
According to some doomsday predictors, the next apocalypse is scheduled for December 21, 2012, when all the planets in our Solar System will supposedly be aligned. What can we expect to happen? Floods, earthquakes, and other natural calamities? Or will it be just another day, like Y2K—where I spent my New Year’s Eve with my friend from a telecom company on call with our cell phones and pagers strapped to our waists like we were wearing Batman and Robin’s utility belts.
Before you go stocking up on bottled water for your bomb shelter, try to keep in mind that much of the hype surrounding this galactic phenomenon is pure sensationalism. Once every few decades, someone conjures up a similar theory to get everyone into a panic, and it always fizzles out into nothing. But at least we’ll get another box-office hit depicting a gruesome demise of the human race by natural disasters. Or a sudden surge in Kool-Aid sales. Those are always fun. Oh, yeahhh!
While we’re on the topics of alignment and disasters, we might as well mention how a misaligned list of bullets or numbers can have cataclysmic effects on your Word document. If you’ve ever struggled hopelessly trying to get those bullets or numbers to line up the way they’re supposed to, you know where I’m coming from.
Don’t get caught in a crossfire when your disaster moment hits! Stray bullets can be dangerous!
Thankfully, there are a few tricks you can try out to wrangle those lists into formation. Here are links to some tips that should help you avoid a catastrophe when working with bullets and numbering:
- Stray Bullets – A few things to try to get your lists in order
- Off the Mark – Using the Format Painter to align bullets and numbers
Having alignment issues with something other than bullets and numbering? Here are some more tips to set you straight:
- Where Does It Stand? – Using Word’s text alignment feature
- Start a Tab – Setting up tab stops in Word
- Get to the Point – Using decimal tabs in Word to align numbers on decimal points
That’s all for this edition of the podcast, but be sure to leave us your comments at www.productiveupodcast.com, visit us on Twitter @productiveUcast, or write a review of our podcast on iTunes.
Until next time, keep watching the skies…but don’t hold your breath waiting to see those planets line up. And certainly don’t drink the Kool-Aid!
Music courtesy of Clayton & Fulcrum
