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Professional Development Work Hacks

Excel: Remove Everything After a Character (like a question mark, comma or underscore)

If you’re looking to use Excel to trim off everything to the right of a question mark, including the question mark (useful for trimming query strings off of URLs), you can use the following formula:

=LEFT(A1, FIND("?", A1&"?")-1)

A1 is the cell that contains the original string.

If you want to use this for a non-URL string, replace the ? with the character you’re looking for.

Read Next: Alexa: The Ultimate Guide to Amazon’s Virtual Assistant

Categories
Professional Development Work Hacks

How to Make TextEdit Open With a Blank File by Default

At some point, Apple made TextEdit start with an Open dialog. This is annoying if you use TextEdit as a quick way to jot down notes (like I do).

The workaround for this is a simple Terminal command. Paste this into Terminal, hit enter, then restart TextEdit:

defaults write -g NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool false
Categories
Professional Development Tech Work Hacks

The Absolute Best Gmail Setup

I feel like the world needs another link to this article: How to use Gmail more efficiently

It only took a couple of minutes to setup, but it changed the way I process my work email.

 

Categories
Professional Development Work Hacks

Save Screenshots to a Different Folder on Your Mac

As a product manager, I create a lot of screenshots when I’m making quick wireframes or reviewing a feature before it ships. And on a Mac, this means my desktop looks like a wasteland of screenshots and scattered dreams.

To combat this issue, I’ve found a quick hack to store my screenshots in a sepearte folder and make it easy to get to my latest screenshot.

  1. Create a folder under your user’s home folder called Screenshots. I’m using /Users/jeff/Screenshots
  2. Open Terminal and enter the following command: defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/your-user-name-here/Screenshots. Make sure you enter the absolute path to the folder. “~/Screenshots” won’t work here!
  3. Log out of your user and back in. Now, your screenshot files should appear in your new folder, and any time you want to clear your screenshots, you can just open that folder and delete everything inside of it.
  4. For easy access, I’ve dragged that Screenshots folder to my dock:

Screen Shot 2013-09-11 at 3.50.37 PM