Whenever I discover something totally obvious that I’m embarassed I didn’t see it before - I think I’ll share it with you under this heading (Sharing the Wealth) so that you don’t ever have to feel my shame.

If you use blogger, make your life a little easier…

In Settings > Formatting, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the form and before clicking on ‘Save Settings’ take a look at the field called “Post Template” immediately above the button. I had completely ignored this field because I thought it was an alternate way to put in a blog template (DOH!) actually, it lets you ‘template’ the actually posts. In other words, if your tired of always changing the font or you have elements that you always include in a post and are tired of copying them out of existing posts to put in the new one - this is for you (see how deep my shame goes?).

Remember: Settings>>Formatting>>Post Template

I’m using it for two simple things - changing the font and including my Raw Sugar/Technorati tags so that I don’t forget to put them in.

Some times, it’s just a good idea to re-iterate information that’s already out there.

Perhaps a half dozen times in the last year, I got fed up with the default color palette in Excel and then have to go hunting for the way to change it, because in a non Excel 2007 instance (thanks Microsoft for bubbling up the color palette in 2007), it’s difficult to get to and more importantly, difficult to remember.

So, if you want to use the colors of your company or web site theme in a report and they’re not in the default palette here’s what you do (at least in Excel 2003):
Tools - Options - Color - Modify.

Now, the palette is limited to only using something like 56 colors at a time so one of the things that you can do is set up your custom pallete and save it as a template and then when you want those colors, you can start a spreadsheet based on the template.

Caveat, selecting a palette that works is difficult (notice how bad the default color choices in Excel are) so if you’re not sure grab the nearest designer or artist and have them help you build a color scheme.