Exciting tips

Desktops and smartphones are very capable. There’s often debate on how effective a smartphone can be and if it can replace a desktop in dire need. That said, there is still a problem when it comes to working across different platforms. If you own an iPhone and a Mac, you can easily sync your clipboard. If you own an iPhone but prefer Windows 10 for your desktop, you cannot sync your clipboard.

Often, when these limitations impede work, users resort to crude alternatives. One easy way to send text from your clipboard across devices is to message them to yourself. Not a lot messaging apps let you do that but you can send messages to yourself via Facebook Messenger.

Send Messages To Yourself

You can send messages to yourself from Facebook Messenger web and from its apps. The process is simple, and the same.

On Facebook Messenger web, click the new message button at the top right of the column on the left. In the To field, type in your own name. Your profile will be listed at the top along with a list of all groups that you’re a part of. Select your own profile and send a text message or an image.

On the smartphone app, tap the new message button at the top right. Again, type in your own name and select your profile. Send a text message or an image from your camera roll.

Web apps are often used to work with different platforms. Some platforms are purposefully kept closed and for this reason, other platforms are unable to freely communicate with them.

There is also a matter of security. While it would be convenient for any phone and any desktop to be able to communicate with each other, it may also be a security risk for devices to be so open. This is why certain impediments must be placed to hinder communication that is too open.

Lastly, convenience and hardware are also an issue. You can, for example easily copy images from an iPhone or an Android phone on a Windows 10 desktop but you do need to connect them via a cable. Android phones don’t all use the same type of cable, and users may not always have the cable on hand. Apps like the Photos app on Windows 10 and its companion app for iOS and Android make up for this but it’s only for photos and not for items copied to the clipboard.

Facebook Messenger has a dark mode but unlike an ordinary feature, you have to unlock it with a simple little trick. The dark mode was likely added in one of the app’s recent updates (the app updates once every two weeks). Check that you’re running the latest version of the app and read on to learn how you can enable Facebook Messenger dark mode on both iOS and Android.

Facebook Messenger dark mode

Open Facebook Messenger and select any chat thread to interact with. You can send yourself messages on Facebook Messenger and that will work perfectly for this trick.

In the chat thread, tap the smiley face icon inside the message input box. Go to the Emoji tab and look for the crescent moon emoji. It’s in the animal/nature category. You need to send it over the chat thread.

When you do, you’ll see an animation featuring the crescent emoji raining down from the top of your screen, except it looks a little scary and it isn’t the same as the emoji that you sent.

When the animation is over, you will see a ‘Try it in Settings’ button accompanied by a ‘You Found Dark Mode’ banner at the top. Tap it, and you’ll switch over to the app’s settings where you can turn dark mode on.

If you don’t see the animation when you send the crescent moon emoji, exit the app on your phone and then open it again. Send the crescent emoji again and it should work this time.

Disable Facebook Messenger dark mode

To disable the dark mode, tap your profile picture thumbnail at the top left to go to the app’s settings. You will see the same dark mode switch as before. Turn it off and you’ll go back to the light mode.

The dark mode is available for all users and maybe, Facebook Messenger will eventually make it more obvious how you can enable it.

The Facebook Messenger dark mode isn’t bad. It’s not devoid of all color. The white interface is replaced with a dark black but the color that you’ve selected for the chat doesn’t change. The text isn’t a sharp white. It’s a lesser white and some text and buttons are a light grey.

There is still a problem where, when you launch the app after quitting it, you will definitely see the white interface. It’s the same with the YouTube app. Even if you have the dark theme enabled, the splash screen features the YouTube logo on a white background and it’s blinding.

You can deactivate, and even delete Facebook if you’re tired of the social network and it’s far from healthy impact on your mental health. Deactivating and deleting Facebook is pretty simple but the same can’e be said if you want to deactivate Facebook Messenger.

Facebook Messenger continues to work even if you have deactivated your Facebook account. This is, in part, because Facebook Messenger exists as a service and app outside of Facebook. In fact, you can use your phone number instead of your Facebook account to use Messenger.

Deactivate Facebook Messenger

If you use Facebook Messenger with your Facebook account, you must first deactivate your Facebook account before you can deactivate Facebook Messenger. If you want to get rid of Facebook Messenger without deactivating Facebook, your only option is to turn chat off. Additionally, you can only deactivate Facebook Messenger from one of its smartphone apps. The web interface doesn’t have a deactivate option.

Open Facebook Messenger on your iPhone or Android phone. Tap your profile picture at the top to go to your settings. Scroll down and tap Legal & Policies.

On the Legal & Policies screen, you will see a Deactivate Messenger option. Tap it and enter your password. Once you’re past the verification screen, tap the Deactivate button.

This will effectively deactivate Facebook Messenger. It will not, however, delete or hide any conversations you’ve had. Other people, with whom you have conversation threads, will still be able to read the chat history.

If you ever want to start using Facebook Messenger again, all you have to do is log back in, and you’re good to go. There doesn’t seem to be a way to delete your Facebook Messenger account other than just deleting the app from it. If your Facebook Messenger account is tied to your Facebook account, then deleting your Facebook account is what it takes to delete Facebook Messenger.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to dispose of your Facebook Messenger account such that all your conversation history goes with it. If you delete your Facebook account, it is possible that the chat thread will no longer show your name and profile picture but if you use a phone number for the messaging service, you might not have any way to remove all traces of your account.

If you’re trying to avoid someone on Facebook Messenger, you can try blocking them, or turning off your active status and read receipts.

When you use your mobile data instead of a WiFi network, your phone’s battery drains faster. This isn’t an Android specific thing. It also happens on iPhones, and any other portable device that can connect to a mobile network. Most people keep their mobile data off until they have to go outside and know they won’t be connected to a WiFi network. If you keep your mobile data on in case your WiFi isn’t working, your battery drains much faster. Android has a built-in feature that lets you automatically disable mobile data on WiFi.

This feature is kind of hidden. It’s only available if you have Developer options enabled.

Enable Developer Options

You need to first enable developer options. Open the Settings app and go to the About Phone section. On some phones, you might have an About device section. Under this section, you need to find the Build number or the Build Information.

Tap the build number seven times and it will enable Developer options.

Disable mobile data on WiFi

Now that you have developer options enabled, open the Settings app and tap Developer Options. Developer Options might be nested under another set of settings. Once you’re on the Developer options screen, scroll down to the Networking group of settings, and turn the ‘Mobile data always active’ option off.

With this option turned off, your device’s mobile data will be turned off when it’s connected to a WiFi network. When your device loses connectivity to a WiFi network, whether it’s because the router has been turned off, the network isn’t working, or you’ve left a WiFi network’s range, mobile data will be turned back on.

When your phone’s battery is low, and you can’t get to a charging point, turning the mobile data off will help it last longer. The difference it makes can be quite a bit. If you’re looking to extend how much use you get out of a single charge, you can also enable low battery mode but doing so will not turn off mobile data. It’s something you have to manually turn off.

iOS has something similar called WiFi Assist though if you want to disable it, you don’t need to enable any special settings. Remember that it’s ‘similar’, not exact. What the feature on iOS does is that it prevents your device from using your cellular data when the WiFi network signal is weak. It doesn’t turn cellular data off. It can prevent your cellular data from being used unnecessarily but it won’t help your battery last longer.

The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones are two exceptionally popular TV shows that have used Snapchat lenses to promote an upcoming season in their respective series. They’ve both had lenses go viral and the latest company that’s getting into Snapchat lenses is Warner Brothers. They’ve introduced a Nun Snapchat lens for the the upcoming movie The Nun set in the Conjuring universe. Here’s how you can enable it.

The Nun Snapchat Lens

We should mention right off the bat that this lens is geo-restricted i.e., it is available only in select countries. There’s no list of available countries that you can check but it appears to be narrow and for some, its release might also be timed to match the release of the movie in a particular country. You can always use a VPN for Snapchat to fake your location and access the Nun Snapchat lens.

To access the Nun Snapchat lens, you need to scan the Snapcode in the image below (via). You can open Snapchat and point the camera towards the image, and take a photo. This ought to enable the lens if it is available in your country. If it isn’t, it will simply open a link to the movie’s page.

If you can’t snap the code from the image above, you can instead just save it. Once saved, open Snapchat and tap your profile icon at the top left. On your Profile screen, tap Add Friends. On the Add Friends screen, go to the Snapcode tab and select the saved image from your camera roll.

As with any Snapchat lens, this one will eventually expire. Since this is meant to promote a movie, it will likely expire sooner than other lenses.

The lens works with the front camera and features you holding the iconic candle in a candle-stand featured in the movie’s poster. You can blow the candle out and the Nun appears behind you. You can check out user uploaded videos by searching for #theNun on Twitter. Twitter also has a little emoji to commemorate the movie and it shows up if you use the hashtag #theNun.

There was a slightly less amusing ad for the Nun that was rolled out on YouTube. It was basically the Nun screaming at you except users never saw the ad coming. It was one of those ads that play in the middle of a video (that’s a thing on YouTube) and is basically a jumpscare ad. Not a lot of people were happy about it and we don’t know if it’s still showing up but the movie is out so it might have been retired.

Personalized emoji, whether you call it memoji, or something else, are becoming a thing. The little yellow heads are still popular but users like to see themselves as these little cartoon characters. Maybe it has something to do with how popular Bitmoji have been. Google has released something called Emoji Mini. They’re basically emoji created from a photo of you and they’re pretty good. Here’s how you can create emoji mini in the Google Keyboard app.

Emoji mini is available for both iOS and Android versions of the Google Keyboard app. Update to the latest version of the app to create your own Emoji mini.

Emoji Mini in Google Keyboard

Open an app that lets you access Google Keyboard. A messaging app is always a safe bet if you want to access a keyboard app and its features. Tap the arrow button at the left to reveal the various items you can insert via the keyboard, and select the sticker button.

There are various types of stickers that you can create but you want to tap the one with the cartoon face indicated in the screenshot below. Allow Google Keyboard to access your camera and position your face inside the frame. Take a photo and allow Google Keyboard to create your mini emoji.

The Emoji mini are fairly accurate however, you’re not stuck with whatever the keyboard creates. Tap the Customize button and you can change any aspect of the emoji that you want.

For some odd reason, black isn’t a hair color but other than that, the customization options are great.

To use the Emoji mini, tap the sticker option in Google Keyboard and it will show you your emoji, and its many variations that you can use.

The emoji are basically stickers so you can send them over any app that you want. You probably can’t send them over SMS but all other messaging apps will be able to send these stickers. More importantly, it won’t matter if the person you’re sending the sticker to is on Android or iOS, or if they have the Google Keyboard app installed or not. The stickers will appear the way they should.

The feature appears to have rolled out to everyone but if you don’t see it just yet, give it a day or two. If you’re worried whether or not the feature will be available on your phone, don’t be. It’s not device specific and it doesn’t require special hardware, other than a camera, to work.

A good document is a numbered document. Microsoft Word lets you number your document and the feature is fairly easy to use with plenty of good looking numbering templates to choose from. Numbering is linear; every page is numbered so if you need to skip pages in a numbered document, you have quite a few hoops to jump through.

Set up document

The trick to skipping pages in a numbered document is to use section breaks. The best way to do this is to first complete your document and then change how it’s numbered. The numbering isn’t set in stone; you can always change it later but it will be more difficult to manage with a work-in-progress.

Once you’ve completed the document, you need hidden formatting to be revealed. To do so, go to the Home tab on the ribbon and click the button indicated below. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to add sections to the document.

Adding Sections

The logic behind adding sections in the document is this; the pages that you want to exclude or skip numbering for must be an entirely different section. This means that just before the pages that are to be excluded start in the document, you must enter a section break. When those pages end, you need to add another section where you will continue the numbering.

To keep things simple, assume you have a three page document. You want the first page to be numbered 1, you want the second page to be skipped, and you want the third page to be numbered 3. This last bit is easy to change so if you want it to be numbered 2 instead of 3, you won’t have any trouble.

Go to Page 1 and navigate to the very end of this page. Go to the Layout tab and click the dropdown next to Breaks. From the menu, select ‘Next Page’. This is the first section that you’ve created. The first page is now a different section, and the second and third pages are one section.

You now need to separate the second page into a section of its own. Go to the very end of the second page, and insert a section break like you did before.

Insert page numbers

Go to the Insert tab on the ribbon and use the Page Number button to insert page numbers. Navigate to the second page which is the section that you want to skip page numbering for. Go to the Insert tab and from the Page Number tool, select the remove page number option. This will remove page numbers for that page/section only.

Go to the page that you want to restart the numbering on, and insert page numbers. The numbering will continue in the next section. To select how it is numbered, i.e., whether it continues with 3, or starts at 2, select the number you want to continue numbering from. That should do the trick.

The setting is bit tricky to get right which is why doing this after you’ve completed a document is the best course of action. Make sure that the header and the numbering is not linked to previous sections or this won’t work.

Aligning text in Microsoft Word is incredibly simple. The Home tab on the ribbon has dedicated buttons that allow you to left align, right align, center align, or justify text. It’s great for when you need to meet certain academic requirements, make a stylish document, or type in different languages. The text alignment can vary for each paragraph. Where text alignment is incredibly easy to mange, it isn’t as easy to align text inside tables. There are dedicated buttons for it as well but they’re somewhat confusing.

Align Text Inside Tables

When you create a table, and enter text in its various cells, it is always aligned to the left. The exception being that you’re typing in a language that writes from right to left in which case the text will always be aligned to the right.

With table cells, there are two alignments to consider; the left/right/center alignment that is measured in terms of the left and right border of the cell, and the top/center/bottom alignment that is measured in terms of the top and bottom border of the cell. By default, the text is aligned left, and to the top of the cell.

To change it, click inside the cell that you want to change the text alignment for. This will activate the two tabs that allow you to customize the table. Go to the Layout tab and you will find there’s an Alignment toolbox there.

The Alignment toolbox has nine buttons for aligning text in a table in Microsoft Word. From left to right, and top to bottom, the buttons let you align text to the right, and top, center and top, and left and top. The second row lets you align text to the right but center it from the top, center the text from the right and the top, align text to the left and center it from the top. The third row lets you align text to the left, and to the bottom of the cell, center text from the right and to the bottom of the cell, and finally, align text to the left and to the bottom of the cell.

These settings may seem excessive however a cell is basically divided into nine sections and the alignment maps to those sections. If all the text is the same size, then your cells will look okay and you won’t be bothered too much about the look of the table. If, however, your text isn’t the same size i.e., some cells have loads of text while others have just a bit, the alignment will make the table easier to read.

Table alignment is different from cell alignment.

MS Excel is an exceptionally intelligent spreadsheet app and it’s not just because it supports a lot of logical arguments. The app can recognize data for what it is, e.g. it knows when it’s dealing with currency, and when it’s dealing with time values. It’s precisely because of this that many of the functions and formulas in MS Excel are so useful. They don’t just add and subtract numbers but can also be applied to time and currency. This feature is by all accounts useful until it starts incorrectly identifying data. Sometimes, MS Excel will recognize data that isn’t a date as just that. It changes the value in a cell and impacts the formulas you apply. The only way to deal with it is to stop numbers converting to date.

This happens mostly when you enter alphanumeric values in a particular format but isn’t limited to just that. For example, if you write 02-02 in a cell, t will automatically be recognized as February 2nd. The cell will then recognize all data you enter in it as a date or time value.

The formulas you apply to the cell are subsequently affected because they aren’t dealing with numbers. Instead, they’re dealing with an entirely different type of data. The solution to this problem is oddly simple.

First, select the cell with the incorrectly identified data. If you look at the dropdown in the ‘Number’ toolbox, it reads ‘Custom’. It doesn’t even read ‘Date’ or ‘Time’, and this is what the problem stems from.

Open this dropdown and select the ‘Text’ option. The data you entered in the cell will change into a number. It’s the equivalent of the date that Excel recognized. Delete the figure you see and enter your original data again. This time, with the cell set to recognize everything as ‘Text’, it will not convert to a date or time, or anything else.

This doesn’t solve every problem you might face with the data in the cell. When you apply a formula to the cell, the data is still recognized as a date except, Excel converts it to the numerical value for that date. The formula you apply isn’t going to give you an accurate value. There’s no easy way around this and you will likely have to reformat the way you select values in your formula, or change how you enter them in a cell.

There’s a lot of trial and error involved here if you have to apply a formula however, if you’re only concerned with presenting data, setting the cell to recognize data as text will do the trick. This setting will persist no matter which device you view the sheet on.

Watermarks are a simple way to protect documents and images from being plagiarized. Sure, people can still find ways to get around it by tracing artwork or typing the contents of a document but that kind of stealing requires effort. It isn’t as instantaneous as clicking a download button and getting the RAW file. There’s also the fact that a watermark is hard to ignore which means if there’s something about a document that you need people to know right away e.g., that it’s confidential, a watermark is the way to go. Here’s how you can easily add a watermark to PowerPoint presentations.

Watermark PowerPoint Presentation

You can add a lot of different design elements to a PowerPoint presentation including tables, graphs, and text boxes. They can all be used to add a watermark to PowerPoint presentations however, you will have to copy and paste them to each slide and, you will also need to make sure they do not cut off part of the actual presentation.

A much easier way to watermark PowerPoint presentations is to add the watermark image to your master slides. When you add something to your master slide, it’s repeated on every single slide automatically. This makes it so that you only need to add the watermark element once.

Open PowerPoint and go to the View tab on the ribbon. Look for the Slide Master button and click it. You will enter the edit mode for the master slide. You can add or remove elements from the master slide if you want.

Now you need to decide what you want to use as a watermark. You can add a text box, or you can insert an image. If you decide to go with an image, make sure you’ve reduced its transparency enough that it will not make the text on your slide difficult to read. You can remove the background from an image in PowerPoint with its built-in tool set.

Simply add the element, and click the Close Master View button when you’re done. Edit the element as much as you want before you click this button. You can always go back and edit it again.

Once you’re done, start adding slides and the watermark will automatically be added to them all.

If you share the original slideshow with someone, i.e., the PPTX file, users will be able to edit the master slide and remove the watermark. Keep that in mind before you share the file, and how you share it i.e., as a PPTX file or a PDF.

We also recommend that you read the article “10 Presentation Aids To Enhance Your Presentation”