10 Simple Design Rules for Professional Microsoft Word Documents

Microsoft Word is packed with so many features that you can produce pretty much whatever you want with it. But these features don’t always result in the kind of beautiful, high-quality, and professional document designs that may be expected of you.

Unlock the "Essential Microsoft Office Shortcuts" cheat sheet now!

This will sign you up to our newsletter

Enter your Email

Read our privacy policy

It’s one thing to know everything about Microsoft Word, all of its intricacies and quirks and functions—it’s something else entirely to know what makes a great document.

1. Keep It Simple, Less Is More

Want to know how to make a Word document look good? Just keep it simple, and take advantage of the hidden features that Microsoft Word comes with. Let this be the driving force behind any design decisions in your documents, and if you walk away remembering only one thing from this article, let it be this one!

When writing a document, the content should be the main focus. Document formatting guidelines exist to make that content easier to read and digest. Eliminate the temptation to introduce eye-catching elements that only serve to distract. Maximize whitespace. Keep your wording tight and revise any wordy sentences or paragraphs. Simple and minimal rules over all.

2. Choose a Context-Appropriate Typeface

Your first big design decision should be which typeface you’re going to use. Traditional knowledge says that serif fonts are easier to read in printed documents whereas sans-serif fonts are better on the eyes when read on a digital screen.

Good examples of serif fonts include Garamond, Georgia, Hoefler Text, and Palatino, while good examples of sans-serif fonts include Arial, Gill Sans, Helvetica, and Lucida Sans. Skip Comic Sans if you want to avoid one of the most common presentation design mistakes. And whatever you end up using, stick to the same typeface throughout the document. If desired, you can use a different typeface for headings.

3. Use Standard Font Size and Color

You can’t learn how to format a word document to look professional without paying attention to look of the text. Most business and academic papers are typed in 12-point font size, which generally produces the most readable paragraphs when combined with the guidelines for page size, margins, and line spacing later in this article.

Some information-dense reports may sometimes go down to 10-point font size, but never less than that. You can speed up font resizing and other actions in Microsoft Word with keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Office.

In general, it’s best to keep your hands off of anything related to colors, especially for printed documents. You’ll have to pay more for the color ink, and it won’t carry over if the document ever gets copied. For digital documents, reserve colored text for critical warnings and the like. Prefer to emphasize using bolded and italic text.

4. Use Standard Page Size and Margins

Nearly all office documents are printed for standard 8½” x 11″ pages, known as US Letter size (also known as A4 elsewhere, which is 210mm x 297mm). This is the only size that’s guaranteed to be available regardless of which printer you use.

As for margins, most style manuals and style guides call for a 1″ margin on all sides of the page, which produces the best readability for line lengths and allows for written annotations if necessary. However, if the document is going to be bound in a binder, you may want to increase the side margins to 1½” to accommodate the rings.

5. Align Paragraphs to the Left

You may be tempted to use justified alignment because that’s what’s used in newspapers and novels and some textbooks, but it’s the wrong choice for office and academic documents. Why is it important to make a document formal? Without formality, your document becomes unreadable.

What you want is left alignment for text. This produces jaggedness on the right side of paragraphs, but it keeps letter spacing as intended by whatever typeface you’re using, and that means optimal legibility. Otherwise, you may end up with typographic rivers, which are extremely distracting and simply look ugly.

6. Indent the First Lines of Paragraphs

Paragraphs should have no extra spacing between them, and the first lines of paragraphs should be indented to make each paragraph stand out. The only exception is for paragraphs that directly follow a section heading, which can be left unindented because the surrounding context makes it clear that it’s its own paragraph.

A general rule of thumb is to make the indent size the same as the font size. Make sure you use Word’s paragraph styling features to handle the indents rather than using the Tab key!

7. Place Images Between Paragraphs

It may be okay to place images inside a paragraph and allow the surrounding text to flow around it, and if your organization prefers it that way, then go ahead and do that. But generally speaking, it can damage readability, especially in data-driven reports.

The safest option, particularly for graphs and charts and tables, is to put images in between paragraphs and keep them center aligned. That way your images are never vying for attention with the surrounding text. It also helps captions to stand out.

8. Choose Context-Appropriate Line Spacing

The right choice for line spacing (the whitespace that separates a line of text from the next line of text) really depends on what kind of document you’re writing.

Academic papers should first follow any academic style guides in place, then prefer double-spacing if no style guide exists. Business and office documents tend to be single-spaced to minimize the number of pages needed when printing, but digital documents may be easier to read if spaced at somewhere between 120-150 percent.

9. Break Up Text With Headings and Lists

The longer the document, the more important headings become. Would you rather read a 20-page report that’s nothing but a wall of text from end to end? Or a 30-page report that’s organized into proper sections, subsections, and headings? I prefer the latter every time.

Lists are also good for breaking up walls of text and drawing eyes to important points. Use numbered lists when counting a set of items (e.g. “the five attributes of a successful entrepreneur”) or when providing step-by-step instructions. Otherwise, bulleted lists are fine. Just be sure to avoid overusing lists, which detracts readability from your Word document design.

10. Separate Sections With Breaks

When you want to learn how to make your report look professional, you need to get acquainted with section breaks. In Microsoft Word, section breaks allow you to differentiate certain pages with changes in orientation, columns, headers, footers, page numbers, and more. Section breaks come in four forms:

• Next Page: Start the next section on the following page.
• Continuous: Start the next section on the current page.
• Even Page: Start the next section on the next even page.
• Odd Page: Start the next section on the next even page.

If your document is large enough to need chapters, this is the best way to format them in a clean way. Each chapter should be made with a “Next Page” section break, or the “Even Page” or “Odd Page” section breaks if you’re going to place it within a binder.

Learning How to Make a Word Document Look Professional

Unless your organization or school requires a specific layout and format, you can skip the hard work of setting up your own template and just download one instead. This helps you quickly achieve a professional document design.

Need an attractive cover page to finalize your document? These cover page templates will put the finishing touches on your Word document.

Read the full article: 10 Simple Design Rules for Professional Microsoft Word Documents

Read Full Article

Make a Personal Budget With Microsoft Excel in 4 Easy Steps

You don’t need expensive software to help you become financially stable. Today, I’m going to share a few of the nifty spreadsheet techniques that I used to generate a useful budget.

Unlock the FREE "Essential Excel Formulas" cheat sheet now!

This will sign you up to our newsletter

Enter your Email

Read our privacy policy

Also, I’m going to share a technique to pay down your debt in a fraction of the time using the same exact payments you’re making today.  It’s a trick that I’ve seen a lot of people trying to sell elsewhere on the net — I’m going to share it with MakeUseOf readers right here, for free.

I want to show you the four ways Excel helped create a stable personal budget.

The Power of Budgeting

Years ago, my wife and I were saddled with so much debt that we thought it would take the next sixty years to pay it all off. There came a moment when we realized that we either had to make a personal budget that could outsmart the system or it would keep us enslaved for our entire adult lives.

That’s when I sat down with a blank Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and just started playing around, using various techniques to cut down our budget to bare bones.

My goal was to create a debt plan that wouldn’t take decades to eliminate our debt, but also wouldn’t keep us eating macaroni and cheese for dinner until we retire. With this plan, we were able to eliminate all of our credit card debt in only five years. In the end, we even had good enough credit to get approved for a low-rate mortgage to buy our first home!

1. Structure Your Personal Budget Spreadsheet

If you’ve ever tried to make a personal budget you know the basics. You need to make a log of all of your bills and all of your income. Your bottom line is how much you have leftover for fun, or tells you how much spending to cut.

It sounds easy, but when you start entering all of your details into a budget things can get very messy very quickly. Sometimes the numbers look bleak, a lot of people give up after the first attempt.

A basic layout is easy enough. List your bills in the first left column. Then in the next few columns list total balance you owe, monthly required payments, and the date that the bill is usually due.  These four columns are really all you need to create a budget.

Here I’ve gone an extra step and added a column to the right for each month for easy expense tracking.

However, as your budget grows to a large number of columns and rows you’re going to run into a problem. The screen will start to scroll and you can’t always see the bills to the left or the header at the top. The quick and easy technique to fix this is using the Freeze Panes feature.

First, select the box where the intersection at the upper left represents the row and column that you don’t want to scroll when you use the spreadsheet’s scrollbars. Select View > Freeze Panes.

 

When you scroll up or down, the header and left column remain in view so you always know what the value you’ve selected applies to. This has saved me a great deal of frustration where I normally would have had to keep scrolling back to check which bill I’d selected.

If you’re new to Excel and need some tips on getting started with creating spreadsheets, make sure to check out Excel courses for beginners.

2. Organize Your Budget Using Shading

I remember searching for a free budget spreadsheet and finding all of these templates filled with data that just made my head spin. Without clear lines separating the major sections of your budget, you’ll have a hard time zoning in on the area that you’re interested in.

The best way to organize a budget spreadsheet is by shading each summary section between your major groups.

As you can see here the first section of the budget pertains to bills, including household utilities and fixed bills. Another section is devoted to credit cards. At the bottom of this particular section, the total for fixed bills is highlighted with light green shading so it’s clear and easy to find.

Once you start shading rows, the entire spreadsheet is easier to read.

Getting started with shading rows is very easy to do.

The Fill tool is located on the Excel menu bar under the Home menu and looks like a paint can tipping over with paint pouring out. Just highlight the entire row and then click the Fill button and select what color you’d like to use.

Try to avoid colors that are too bright or too dark. The shading provides a nice divider when looking at your budget, it should not be overwhelming.

3. Use Excel Formulas to Project Your Credit Card Balances Into the Future

Now that you can make a personal budget that is well organized and easy to follow, the next step is attacking credit card debt.

 

Set up your debt log in the same way. Split and freeze the panes, but this time list each month along the left and your credit card balances (and monthly payments) to the right.

After you’ve entered your current balance in the top cell (In this example Capital One is $3,000), in the next cell below it you would enter a formula that multiplies that balance by your card’s interest rate and divides by twelve. That is your estimated monthly interest.

Then you subtract your monthly payment from the balance and add the interest that you just calculated.

Now you can duplicate the formula for every month below it by clicking and holding the small box to the lower right of the cell you just calculated and dragging it down as far as you like.

Each month will have a new calculated balance based on the previous month’s balance.

When you do this formula, you’ll eventually find the date where the balance is completely paid off. As you can see, when I maintain a $250 payment every month it’ll take me until July 2021 to pay off the entire Advanta credit card balance.

For more on saving money and reducing your spending, take a look at these helpful apps and sites.

4. Recalculate Payments Based on Interest and Eliminate Your Debt

By playing around with this kind of spreadsheet I uncovered a common-sense solution that a lot of finance gurus out there are charging people for.

Instead of maintaining constant payments on each of your credit cards until it’s paid off, you pay the minimum balance on all of them and divert all of your current “debt-payment” money toward the credit card with the highest interest.

Here is how it works.

According to my sheet, the Advanta card will be paid off in May of 2021. Instead of saving this money, it’s going to be used to pay more debt.

I took the extra $200 I was paying on the Advanta and added it to the Capital One payment. This takes the payment from $100 to $300.

Now the Capital One card will be paid off by February 2022. If you have additional credit card balances, you simply “snowball” the payment and eliminate your debt in months rather than years.

This is why I love Excel. By using the ability to autofill the monthly balance calculations, I was able to test different scenarios to pay off debts faster.

Using Excel for Budgeting

The power of Excel for budgeting and debt planning like this can’t be understated. And even if you don’t use Excel, you should at least explore the various budget and debt planning tools available out there. Make the commitment to try a few out and work on it regularly.

In the beginning, it will take a lot of work to set up, but it will be worth it in the end.

And, be sure to check out these ways to avoid overspending and then bookmark some of these helpful sites that keep you on top of the financial market.

Read the full article: Make a Personal Budget With Microsoft Excel in 4 Easy Steps

Read Full Article

The 4 Worst Arguments for Teaching Cursive in Schools

American schools are slowly phasing out cursive handwriting, which is an unambiguously good move. Cursive is an archaic form of communication—one best left to history.

Let’s take a look at some common arguments for teaching cursive in schools, and why they don’t hold up.

Note: In February 2015, former author Justin Pot wrote an opinion article titled Cursive Writing Is Obsolete; Schools Should Teach Programming Instead. Then, in August 2015, he wrote this follow-up article to respond to some of the most common arguments.

The article needed an update, so we’ve brought it up to modern standards. While the author performing the update agrees with the sentiment that cursive writing is not worth teaching in schools today, we’ve preserved as much of the content and tone of Justin’s original article as possible.

Defining Cursive Writing

To be clear, when we talk about “cursive handwriting” we speak mostly of the Palmer Method, a simplified form of script popularized in the early 20th century. It was designed specifically with speed in mind (in part to better compete with typewriters).

This kind of writing is, in our humble opinion:

• Slower than typing.
• Harder to learn and read than print handwriting.
• Ugly when compared to more stylized scripts.

There’s literally no reason for schools to teach the Palmer Method, outside of nostalgia. While we feel that cursive should not be taught in schools, we want to respond to the other side who thinks cursive is far from pointless.

Many Made Good Arguments in the Comments

Plenty of educators agreed with some of the original premise and critiqued the finer points. We welcome these conversations.

We can concede some of the arguments for why teaching cursive writing makes sense. For example:

• There is a sense of accomplishment that comes with learning cursive.
  • While this is true, we think teaching a beautiful, pre-Palmer script in art class is a better way for kids to get that feeling. Let’s stop pretending this is a practical skill.
• Being able to read old letters from relatives is extremely valuable.
  • Of course, but you can learn to read documents like this without spending dozens of hours learning to write an obsolete script yourself. It’s still English, even if it takes a little longer to decipher.

Feel free to disagree with us on these or other reasoned points—we invite the conversation. But what we won’t invite is any variation of the following arguments, which are pretty much complete gibberish.

1. Kids Will Be Cut Off From History!

A number of people claimed that not teaching cursive cuts people off from their history. The typical comment goes like this:

Some went a little bit further, submitting speculative fiction for our consideration:

Ridiculous as this might seem, there is a certain logic here. Learning to write cursive means you can also read it, meaning you can better understand documents like this:

You probably know this as the original version of the Declaration of Independence, right? Surprise: that’s not what most people read at the time. Most historians agree that this engrossed copy of the declaration was signed in August of 1776, a month after the document was famously ratified on July 4th, 1776.

The first published copies of the document, known as the Dunlap broadsides, looked like this:

That’s right: in July of 1776, Congress approved the original Declaration and people immediately started reading it in print. This shouldn’t be surprising; the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, over three hundred years after Gutenberg’s printing press.

Kids not taught cursive would have no trouble reading this. If you want to argue that Americans in July of 1776 were less connected to history than someone who read a cursive version later on, we don’t know what to say to you. The fact is that printed copies of America’s founding documents are widely available today, just as they were in the 1700s—in many cases before the handwritten “originals” we know today.

In addition, none of these documents were written using the hideous Palmer Method, which wasn’t popularized until the early 20th century. Go ahead and dig through some old newspapers, and you’ll see the difference.

One does not need to learn cursive in order to read America’s founding documents. It wasn’t the case in the 1700s and certainly is not now. Consider that most people alive today cannot read religious texts or other historical documents in their original languages, either.

2. When the Apocalypse Comes, We’ll Need It!

Some of the silliest comments revolved around what would happen if someone took out the electrical grid, such as this one:

The obvious counters for this argument are as follows:

• Print handwriting works just fine without electricity.
• Assuming we’re going to make surviving post-apocalyptic scenarios part of the curriculum, we should probably prioritize trapping, fishing, farming, and log cabin construction over letters with loops.

3. Kids Need to Have a Signature!

One subject came up again and again: everyone in today’s society needs to have a signature.

This seems like a good point, but we don’t think it holds up. Here are some of the reasons why:

• As any clerk will tell you, most people’s signatures are entirely illegible squiggles at this point. Most places also don’t bother to check your signature anyway.
• Spending hundreds of hours of classroom time on an archaic form of written communication specifically so we can continue to verify transactions seems weird, considering most signatures aren’t legible.
  • Even someone who doesn’t know how to write in cursive could come up with a solid signature in a reasonable amount of time. Failing that, your legal signature could literally be a squiggly horizontal line.
• Signing documents electronically is increasingly common, and might well become the norm. The US ESIGN Act was passed all the way back in 2000 and lays out guidelines for digital signatures.
• Printing works perfectly fine for signatures, as a few comments pointed out.

4. Technology Is Destroying Something Real

A number of comments made nostalgic arguments, saying that something real is being lost in this transition. This one, left under an article on Justin Pot’s personal website, represents this argument best:

We respect what this person has said, but think these arguments miss a key point. Comments like this imply that cursive handwriting is some innate part of being human, but it isn’t. It’s an invention.

Cursive writing is a technology.

There’s nothing natural about handwriting: it’s a tool that we used for a particular period of time to communicate. Today people are using it less and less because they’ve deemed the alternatives as better.

In a sense, that’s too bad—something is lost every time a technology is replaced. The compass meant fewer people learned how to navigate using the stars, while GPS has resulted in fewer people knowing how to use a compass.

But this doesn’t mean we should give up on the GPS, or teach everyone how to navigate by the stars. Some people will pursue this knowledge for fun, or because it’s been passed down by their family, but mandating everyone learns it just isn’t realistic.

The fact that people use cursive writing less often today isn’t because schools have stopped teaching it. The opposite is true: schools aren’t teaching cursive because students don’t use that skill later in life. Many haven’t been for decades.

Ours isn’t the activist argument. The other side wants to keep something irrelevant in the school systems out of nostalgia, while that time could be used for teaching something productive. We’re not the one who needs to leave well enough alone.

But hey, maybe we’re just lazy and uncoordinated.

Better Uses of Time Than Teaching Cursive Writing

We close with a few ideas on what students could learn that’s a more productive use of time than antiquated cursive writing. While some schools may teach the following, they’re not as ingrained in the schooling system as cursive writing has been:

• Computer programming. The ubiquitous nature of computers today means that learning a bit about how to program them is extremely useful. Learning to code also teaches logical thinking.
• Civics. A 2019 study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that 22% of sampled Americans cannot name a single branch of the government. This is, frankly, pathetic—any country would do well to educate its citizens on how the government actually works.
• Personal finance. Many kids graduate from school not understanding basic financial principles, like how interest rates work or how to save for retirement. WalletHub found that some 10 percent of people think it’s worth going into debt for a new iPhone. Surely learning to manage money, which is something you use every day, is more important than writing letters in a certain style.

Should Cursive Still Be Taught in Schools?

Progress takes place over centuries, meaning something that seems like part of the natural order when you’re a kid was alien to prior generations.

The Palmer Method was harshly criticized and resisted in its early days, but its speed meant it ultimately won out over better-looking scripts. Over one hundred years later, this method is on the way out, because the alternatives are better.

Making predictions about technology is impossible, but so is trying to prevent an obsolete technology from sticking around. And that’s exactly what anyone trying to keep cursive handwriting in the school curriculum is trying to do. Why dedicate so much time to something most people barely use anymore? You’d be hard-pressed to find a job interviewer who finds handwriting at all relevant.

But this, of course, is our opinion. We’d like to hear yours too. And if this has inspired a drive to return to cursive for you, check out the best resources to improve your handwriting.

Read the full article: The 4 Worst Arguments for Teaching Cursive in Schools

Read Full Article

How to Find and Remove Duplicates in Numbers on Mac

When you’re working with data in Apple Numbers on your Mac, you may run into a situation where you have duplicates. This could be names, email addresses, products, colors, or something else. And if you have a lot of data in your spreadsheet, finding and removing those duplicates can be a challenge.

We’re going to show you a few different methods you can use to find duplicates and then either mark them or eliminate them if you like.

Find Duplicates in Numbers With Sorting

If you don’t have a lot of data in your spreadsheet, you can sort it and check for duplicates manually. This method might actually save you time in the long run, but again, only if you don’t have thousands of rows in your sheet.

Sort by One Column

1. Select the table of data by clicking anywhere in the table and then clicking the circle on the top left. This is to the left of column A.
2. Move your cursor over the column you want to sort by.
3. Click the arrow that displays next to the column letter and choose either Sort Ascending or Sort Descending.

Sort by Multiple Columns

1. Follow the same steps as above, but instead of selecting a Sort option in the shortcut menu, click Show Sort Options.
2. The right-hand sidebar should open to the Sort
3. Make sure that Sort Entire Table is selected in the first dropdown box.
4. In the Sort by dropdown, choose the column and below that, pick Ascending or Descending.
5. Another dropdown box should appear beneath where you can choose another column and its sort order.
6. The data should sort automatically, but if not, click the Sort Now button at the top of the sidebar.

Once you sort your data you should more easily be able to spot the duplicates and then mark or remove them as you need to.

Find Duplicates in Numbers With Functions

There are two built-in functions in Numbers that you can use to find duplicates. These are the IF and COUNTIF functions. IF can display duplicates as True or False, or a word that you assign. COUNTIF will display how many times an item appears to indicate duplicates.

Find Duplicates With the IF Function

To illustrate how the function will work, our example data will be product names in column A and our table has column headers in row 1.

1. Add another column or move to an empty column in your sheet where you want the duplicate indicator.
2. Click the cell in the second row, below the header, and open the Functions Editor by entering the Equal sign (=).
3. Enter IF(A2)=(A1),”Duplicate”,” “ in the editor. This will compare the cell with the one above it and enter the word Duplicate if it’s a duplicate and enter a space if it’s not.
4. Click the checkmark to apply the formula.
5. Copy the formula to the subsequent cells by clicking the cell it’s in and dragging it down the column when you see the yellow circle on the border.

If you prefer not to use a word of your own and just display True for duplicates and False for non-duplicates, you can simply enter (A2)=(A1) in the editor. This works without adding IF before it.

Find Duplicates With the COUNTIF Function

We’ll use the same example data as above using column A and our table has column headers.

1. Add another column or move to an empty column in your sheet where you want the duplicate indicator.
2. Click the cell in the second row, below the header, and open the Functions Editor by entering the Equal sign (=).
3. Enter COUNTIF(A,A2) in the editor. A is the column and A2 represents the row.
4. Click the checkmark to apply the formula.
5. Copy the formula to the subsequent cells the same way as Step 5 above.

You should now see numbers in that new column showing how many times the item in your duplicate column appears. For our example in the screenshot above, you can see that Cap appears three times, Coat once, and Gloves twice.

Remove Duplicates from Numbers

If you use one of the above functions to identify your duplicates because you have a lot of data, then you likely want to remove them without searching manually, right? If so, you can simply jump to the top of our tutorial and use one of the sorting methods.

You can sort by the word Duplicate using the IF function, True, or False, or by numbers, if you use the COUNTIF function. Once you sort, you can simply delete the duplicate rows.

Merge and Delete Duplicates from Numbers

Maybe you do want to remove the duplicates, but you also don’t want to lose any data. For instance, you might have inventory data for products like in our example. So you want to total those amounts before you delete the duplicates. To do this, you’ll need to merge the data first and for this task, you’ll use both a formula and a function in Numbers.

Merge the Data

For our example, we’re going to leave the Duplicate indicator column we used with the IF function because we’ll need it later. Then, we’re going to add another column to the right for our Totals.

1. Click the cell in the second row, below the header, and open the Functions Editor by entering the Equal sign (=).
2. Enter (B2)+IF(A2)=(A3),(H3),0 in the editor. (You can see a breakdown of these formula elements below.)
3. Click the checkmark to apply the formula.
4. Copy the formula to the subsequent cells.

Formula Breakdown

(B2) is the cell containing our first quantity.

+ will add that quantity to what follows.

IF(A2)=(A3) checks for a duplicate between the two cells.

(H3) is where the result of the quantity total will display.

0 will be added if there’s no duplicate.

Once you finish merging the data, it’s important that you double-check to be sure everything adds up correctly.

Delete the Duplicates

To remove the duplicates after you merge data, you’ll use the sort action again. But first, you need to create new columns to copy and paste the data results as values so they are no longer formulas.

Using our same example, we’ll copy and paste the Duplicate and Total columns.

1. Select both columns and then click Edit > Copy from the menu bar.
2. Select the new columns where you want to paste them and click Edit > Paste Formula Results from the menu bar.
3. Delete the columns with the formulas by selecting them again and right-clicking or clicking the column header arrow and choosing Delete Selected Columns.

Now you can sort by the Duplicate indicator column that you keep using the sorting instructions at the beginning of this tutorial. You should see all of your duplicates grouped together so you can delete those rows.

You can next also remove the original Quantity and Duplicate columns you used for the functions and formulas. This will leave you with no duplicates and merged data.

Note: Again, before you delete columns, rows, or other data from your spreadsheet, be sure that everything is correct and that you no longer need it.

Duplicates in Numbers

It’s bound to happen at one time or another, duplicates showing up in your Numbers spreadsheets. But with this tutorial, hopefully you can easily identify those duplicates, merge their data if needed, and then remove the duplicates for a cleaner sheet.

For more help with your spreadsheets, check out how to use conditional formatting in Numbers or add checkboxes, sliders, and popup menus in Numbers on Mac.

Read the full article: How to Find and Remove Duplicates in Numbers on Mac

Read Full Article

How Android Accessibility Services Can Be Used to Hack Your Phone

The Android Accessibility Service is a key part of helping the elderly and disabled use their smartphones. However, it also opens up the door for malware developers to create sneaky malware ruins people’s day.

Let’s explore the Android Accessibility Service, and how it can be used for malicious intent.

What Is the Android Accessibility Service?

The Android Accessibility Suite allows apps to take control of the phone to perform special tasks. The main goal is to aid people with disabilities to use their phone.

For example, if the developer is concerned that people with bad vision couldn’t read some text, they can use the service to read the text out to the user.

The service can also perform actions for the user and overlay content over other apps. These are all intended to help people use their phones and allow users with a wide range of different disabilities to use their devices.

Note that this is different from the Android Accessibility Suite. While the Accessibility Service is for developers who want to enhance their apps, the Android Accessibility Suite is used for providing apps to help the disabled.

How Can the Android Accessibility Service Be Misused?

Unfortunately, giving developers more control over a phone always has malicious potential. For example, the same feature that reads text out to the user can also scan the text and send it to the developer.

Controlling user actions and displaying overlay content are both key elements for a clickjacking attack. Malware can use this service to click buttons for itself, such as granting itself administration privileges. It can also overlay content over the screen and trick the user into clicking on it.

Examples of Malicious Use of the Android Accessibility Service

We could talk about the potential of malware using the Android Accessibility Service, but what better way to learn than using real-world examples? Android’s malware history has plenty of attacks that use the Android Accessibility Service for its own gain, so let’s explore some of the heavy hitters.

Cloak and Dagger

Cloak and Dagger was one of the scarier examples of this kind of malware. It combined the Accessibility Service with an overlay drawing service to read everything on a user’s phone.

The main headache with fighting Cloak and Dagger was in its execution. It used legitimate Android services to carry out the attack, which allowed it to sneak past antiviruses and detection. It also made it easy for the developers to upload infected apps to the Google Play store, as the security check wouldn’t pick up on it.

Anubis

Anubis is a banking Trojan that operates by stealing banking credentials from users and sending them back to the developer. Banking Trojans are one of the popular methods hackers use to break into bank accounts.

Anubis utilized the Accessibility Services to read what people were typing. Banking Trojans typically get the financial details by showing a fake overlay that looks like the banking app. This fools the user into entering their details into the fake bank overlay instead of the official app.

Anubis skipped this step by reading what is entered on the keyboard. Even if the user took the care to enter their details into the real banking app, Anubis would still get their details.

Ginp

Let’s explore something a little more recent. Ginp is an Android Trojan that takes inspiration from Anubis. While it contained code from Anubis, the program wasn’t a modded version of the source malware. The developer built it from scratch, then later stole code from Anubis to perform specific functions.

Ginp would pretend to be Adobe Flash Player, then ask the user if they wanted to install it. It would then ask for several permissions, including Accessibility Services.

If the user granted the fake Flash Player permission, Ginp would then use the service to grant itself administration privileges. With these privileges, it could then set itself as the phone’s default phone and SMS app. From here, it could harvest SMS messages, send messages of its own, glean the contacts list, and forward calls.

To make things worse, Ginp also took a page from Anubis’ book and moved into bank scams. It uses the Accessibility Services to overlay a bank login page over the official app’s page, which then harvests the user’s login details and credit card information.

What Is Google Doing to Defend Users?

When the Accessibility Service fell into the hands of malware developers, Google tried to stop misuse. Back in 2017, they sent an email to developers stating that any apps that don’t use the service for aiding the disabled will have their app immediately deleted.

Unfortunately, this hadn’t put a stop to people uploading infected apps. In fact, due to its nature of using official services, it’s quite hard to notice accessibility misuse.

Apps on third-party stores don’t fare well, either. Google scans the Google Play service for hacking apps and deletes anything it finds. Third-party stores, however, don’t have this luxury. This means that apps on third-party stores can misuse Accessibility Services as much as they like without detection.

How to Avoid Android Accessibility Services Malware

When you install an app on Android, you sometimes see a list of permissions the app wants to use. There are obvious red flags to spot for, such as a note-taking app asking for full control over your SMS messages.

When an app asks for access to the accessibility services, however, it doesn’t seem too suspicious. After all, what if the app has additional features to help the disabled? It’s a permission that users feel safe saying yes to, which can cause problems if the app has malicious intent.

As such, be careful with accessibility service permissions. If a viral and highly-rated app asks for them, it’s safe to assume it’s to help the disabled. However, if a relatively new app with minimal reviews asks for them out of the blue, it may be best to exercise caution and not go ahead with the install.

Also, use the official app store as often as possible. While accessibility attacks are hard to spot, Google will delete any apps that are caught red-handed. Third-party stores, however, may let these apps linger on their store as it infects more and more users.

Keeping Your Phone Safe From Permission Abuse

It may seem innocent enough to give an app access to disability services, but the results can be anything but. Malicious apps can use Android’s Accessibility Services to monitor what you’re typing, display overlays to fool people, and even grant themselves higher access.

If you want to learn more about malware permission abuse, check the smartphone app permissions you need to check today.

Read the full article: How Android Accessibility Services Can Be Used to Hack Your Phone

Read Full Article

Why Do Data Caps Exist and How Can You Bypass Them?

It’s common knowledge that mobile providers like AT&T and T-Mobile throttle user connections after they use a certain amount of data in a month—but did you know that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) might be doing the same thing?

Why do companies impose data caps, and what can you do about it?

The Reason Behind Data Caps

Before answering this question, let’s define what data caps are. Both ISPs and mobile providers put a limit on how much data you can use in a month. For example, there’s a Comcast data cap in many states across the US. And even though unlimited mobile plans are more prevalent than a few years ago, most plans still have data capping in some form.

What happens once you use that amount of data? It depends on the provider. Sometimes your connection is slowed down, also known as throttled. Or companies charge you for the data you use above the cap. In some cases, you simply lose internet access altogether.

So why do data caps exist? Mobile providers have repeatedly stated that data caps allow for lower prices and help ease congestion. Verizon has told the US federal government that data caps exist to relieve the need to throttle their customers. Cable ISPs also use data caps to manage “congestion” but there are several reasons why many people are skeptical.

First of all, the amount of data available on cell phone plans has skyrocketed faster than the speed at which additional infrastructure has been built. You might have expected to get several gigabytes of data on your plan a few years ago, but now it’s easy to get dozens of gigabytes for the same price.

And yet, even with so many people streaming mobile video, the providers aren’t saying that congestion has increased significantly.

Second, and more importantly, is that cable companies and their lobbyists are starting to admit that their data caps are more about making money than relieving congestion. The lead lobbyist of the cable industry put it simply as, “Our principal purpose is how to fairly monetize a high fixed cost.”

Many people are getting fed up with data caps, especially when companies put caps in place and then charge more money to get the same service that customers previously had. Remember that Comcast data cap? You can remove that for an extra $50 a month.

What You Can Do About Throttling and Data Caps

Before looking at how to bypass your data caps, you may want to first register your support with groups who are lobbying against the price gouging practice that’s taking place in the name of (non-existent) congestion relief.

StopTheCap.com has a great page on how to take action against ISP data caps, and many of the suggestions apply against mobile providers as well.

Many people believe that usage-based pricing and data caps violate the central tenets of a free and fair internet, and that the time has come for customers to speak up against these unfair practices. Sign petitions, share information, and get in touch with your representatives to make your preference known.

How to Bypass Data Caps

Now that you’ve taken a moment to address the root of the problem, let’s explore how you can get past data caps on your own internet and mobile plans.

Technically, you can’t bypass your data cap. Once you’ve been throttled, you’re stuck until the end of the month—unless you resort to questionable practices, like deleting the throttle-service file mentioned in our article on avoiding mobile data throttling.

How to Avoid Mobile Data Caps

But if you find that you’re hitting your data limit on a regular basis, you can use data compression to your advantage. We’ll start with mobile options, as there are more of them:

1. Enable data compression. Some web browsers can compress the data you download to your device. Google Chrome offers data compression on both Android and iOS, which will lower your monthly consumption of bandwidth. Opera’s Turbo function does the same thing.
2. Use a VPN with compression. Some mobile VPNs, like Hotspot Shield, offer data compression to further limit the amount of data you consume.
3. Install data-saving apps. Because of the irritating prevalence of data caps, developers have started creating apps that help you consume less data in various ways. Samsung provides an app for its Android devices called Samsung Max.

These are just a few of the steps you can take to reduce your mobile internet usage.

How to Avoid ISP Data Caps

Unfortunately, there are fewer tried and tested strategies for avoiding throttling from your ISP. The deployment of data caps by ISPs is more recent and not as widespread (at least in the US) so counter-tactics are still being developed. Here’s what we know so far, but as we come across more, we’ll keep you updated!

1. Tweak your browser settings for maximum data savings. The best thing you can do here is to make all plug-ins click-to-play (we have tutorials on this for Chrome and Firefox). This is a good idea for all sorts of reasons, but it will definitely save on data. You can even disable images if you really need to cut down on your bandwidth.
2. Use Opera’s Turbo function. The desktop version of Opera offers data compression with Turbo.

As of right now, that’s the best way to go. You might be able to find a desktop VPN that offers data compression, but they seem to be rare, possibly because of the massive amount of data they’d be asked to compress.

It’s Time For Change

Data caps are a blatant money grab and they don’t do customers any good. There’s ample reason to take a stand and voice your displeasure to ISPs and mobile providers.

But until enough people form a unified front, we’ll have to resort to finding ways around them. Unfortunately, internet issues are hard to mobilize around, as we see with the debate over net neutrality.

Read the full article: Why Do Data Caps Exist and How Can You Bypass Them?

Read Full Article

While other tech giants fund housing initiatives, Amazon is opening a homeless shelter — inside its HQ

As big tech gets bigger, industry leaders have begun making more noise about helping homeless populations, particularly in those regions where high salaries have driven up the cost of living to heights not seen before. Last January, for example, Facebook and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, among other participants, formed a group called the Partnership for the Bay’s Future that said it was going to commit hundreds of millions of dollars to expand affordable housing and strengthen “low-income tenant protections” in the five main counties in and around San Francisco. Microsoft meanwhile made a similar pledge in January of last year, promising $500 million to increase housing options in Seattle where low- and middle-income workers are being priced out of Seattle and its surrounding suburbs.

Amazon has made similar pledges in the past,with CEO Jeff Bezos pledging $2 billion to combat homelessness and to fund a network of “Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities,” as he said in a statement posted on Twitter at the time, in September 2018.

Now, however, Amazon is taking an approach that immediately raises the bar for its rivals in tech: it’s opening up a space in its Seattle headquarters to a homeless shelter, one that’s expected to become the largest family shelter in the state of Washington.

Business Insider reported the news earlier today, and it says the space will be able to accommodate 275 people each night and that it will offer individual, private rooms for families who are allowed to bring pets. It will also feature an industrial kitchen that’s expected to produce 600,000 meals per year.

The space is scheduled to open in the first quarter of the new year, and is part of a partnership Amazon has enjoyed for years with a nonprofit called St. Mary’s Place that has been operating a shelter out of a Travelodge hotel on Amazon’s campus since 2016. The new space, which BI says will have enough beds and blankets for 400 families each year, isn’t just owned by Amazon but the company has offered to pay for its utilities, maintenance, and security for the next 10 years or as long as Mary’s Place needs it.

BI notes that the shelter will make a mere dent in Seattle’s homeless population, which includes 12,500 people in King County, where Seattle is located, but it’s still notable, not least because of the company’s willingness to house the shelter in its own headquarters.

It’s a move that no other tech company of which we’re aware has taken. The decision also underscores cities’ equivocation elsewhere, including in San Francisco, over where their own, growing homeless populations should receive support. In just one memorable instance, after San Francisco Mayor London Breed last March floated an idea of turning a parking lot along the city’s Embarcadero into a center that would provide health and housing services and stays for up to 200 of the city’s 7,000-plus homeless residents, neighboring residents launched a campaign to squash the proposal. It was later passed anyway.

Vox noted in report about Microsoft’s $500 million pledge last year that many of these kinds of corporate efforts tend to elicit two types of reactions: admiration for the companies’ efforts — or frustration over the publicity these initiatives receive. After all, it’s hard to forget that Amazon paid no federal tax in the U.S. in 2018 on more than $11 billion in profit before taxes. The company also threatened in 2018 to stop construction in Seattle if the city passed a tax on major businesses that would have raised money for affordable housing.

Whether Amazon — one of the most valuable companies in the world, with a current $915 billion market cap — is doing its fair share is certainly worthy of exploring.

Still, a homeless shelter at the heart of the company is worth acknowledging — and perhaps emulating — too.

“It’s not one entity that’s going to solve this,” Marty Hartman, the executive director of Mary’s Place, tells BI. “It’s not on corporations. It’s not on congregations. It’s not on government. It’s not on foundations. It’s all of us working together.”

Pictured above: A view of the new Mary’s Place Family Center from the street, courtesy of Amazon.

Read Full Article

Google Pixel 4A renders include a headphone jack and hole-punch display

It’s the slowest week of the year for gadget news. Christmas is in the rearview, and it’s a few days until the new year. After that, it’s a straight shot to CES and then MWC. Meantime, best we’ve got going for us are a handful of rumors, including a peek at what Google’s next budget might could potentially possibly conceivably look like.

Per renders from OnLeaks and 91Mobiles, a vision of the Pixel  4A has appeared — or, a render, rather. The handset will no doubt be an important one for Google. After all, the 3A (pictured at top) helped the company recover from some lackluster sales last year. A couple of pieces jump out at first glance. The display appears to finally buck the company’s longtime notch dependency, in favor of a hole punch camera on the front.

Perhaps even more compelling, the device seems to hold the torch for the headphone jack. In 2020, that could well be a standout feature even among mid-range handsets. As the company eloquently put it around the time of the 3A’s release, “a lot of people have headphones.”

And here comes my last late #Christmas gift in form of your very first and early look at the #Google #Pixel4a!
360° video + gorgeous 5K renders + dimensions, on behalf of my Friends over @91mobiles -> https://t.co/rsvRkjVOln pic.twitter.com/sqG6J5knSR

— Steve H.McFly (@OnLeaks) December 28, 2019

Other notable features on the forthcoming devices include the addition of the squircle phone bump on the rear, a design element borrowed from the Pixel 4. Likely the handset will stick to a single camera, instead of adopting the flagship’s truly excellent dual-camera set up. Even so, Google’s been able to accomplish some solid imaging technology with just the one sensor, courtesy of clever ML software.

The display, too, will be slightly larger than its predecessor, bumping up one or two tenths of an inch. The handset is reportedly dropping around May, probably just in time for I/O 2020.

Read Full Article