Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with format

Right way to format and partition an external HD in 2013

Protocols of the Elders of Sockpuppetry — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 12:31:33 -0800

Best way to format/partition external HD for OS intercompatibility? I have a 3 TB external drive in a SATA III-USB 3.0 enclosure.

I'd like to put all my files on it - music, media including movies, work stuff, home stuff, etc; and also back up some other computers' HD's periodically. I might even want a bootable partition.

Problem is, one of those computers is a Mac, and another is a box that dual boots Windows 7 and kubuntu, and another is a Windows 8 machine.

I can't really figure out what the right format is. Maybe there's no right answer. If someone who knows could discuss and briefly summarize the pertinents, I'd be obliged.

How to cite a source within a source?

flying_trapeze — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:06:41 -0800

I'm creating an MLA bibliography. I've accessed the author's writings through similar links like here, but am not sure how to cite them. Are there any online guides that address citing both the book and the website it's on?

Borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties?

jason's_planet — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 12:47:32 -0800

Hey, music geeks! Can someone please explain the recent retro-fetishization of the cassette tape? When and where did this trend begin? A couple of weeks ago, I went to a show in the East Village featuring a neo-psychedelic electronic act that answered to the name Motion Sickness of Time Travel. At the end of the performance, I went to the table near the entrance and asked if they had any CDs. They didn’t have any CDs. What they had were cassette tapes.

My mind was blown. I could not for the life of me understand why anyone who had a choice would spend perfectly good money on a cassette tape. I had grown up with that format in the 1980s. I remember that my first tape was Motley Crue’s Shout At the Devil. I also remember this:

Casette tapes sucked.

The sound was about thirty percent hiss. You couldn’t cue particular songs. And if the tape player was having a bad day, it would eat your purchase. As soon as the CD made its appearance, I hopped on that bandwagon and never looked back.

I’m guessing that this is some kind of artistic choice. That’s the only explanation that makes sense in a world with easy access to MP3s, CDs and vinyl records. If this is an artistic choice, can someone please explain it to me? What is the aesthetic reasoning behind the use of cassette tapes in a market with far superior formats? When and where did this trend begin?

Many thanks in advance.

Did my iPod Classic finally kick the bucket?

muckster — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 01:53:36 -0800

Did my iPod Classic finally kick the bucket? It's a generic "Portable Audio Player" now, and Windows refuses to format it. I've had this 80 GB iPod classic for a long time. Last night, I decided to reformat it because it was starting to feel slow and I wanted to replace all the music on it.

It didn't go so well. The iPod is now recognized by Windows 7 only as "Portable Audio Player". When I try to open it in Windows Explorer, I get "You need to format the disk in drive I: before you can use it."

Neither Winamp (my main music player) nor iTunes recognize it. I tried switching USB ports, rebooting, resetting, no luck.

When I try to format it--with any combination of settings--I get the following messages: "Windows was unable to complete the format" and "Check to see that the disk and drive are connected properly, make sure that the disk is not read-only, and then try again. For more information, search Help for read-only files and how to change them."

I did a bunch of googling and found mentions of this problem but no solution. I tried resetting, I tried entering disc mode, and I did the self check. The hard drive test gives me these results:

Retracts: 93
Reallocs: 904
Pending Sectors: 10
PowerOn Hours: 4759
Star/Stops: 930
Temp: 27c, Min 9 Max 51

Does the high number of reallocs mean that the HD is dying? Is there any hope for this thing? I would appreciate any & all suggestion what else I might try. I love my ipod but I'm not sure how I feel about buying a new one at this point. Thanks much!

How to recreate the style of a document?

alice ayres — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 08:28:58 -0800

Two part question regarding a template and title for a document I am working on. I really like the look and feel of this document. The style of the document is neat and varied across pages, which I think will help highlight the different types of details and accomplishments in an accomplishments document that I am looking to put together.

I would like to create a document that has a similar layout and formatting. What is the best way to go about creating the template? Is this doable at all in Word? If Word is not an option, I probably don't have the skills to make this layout. Who can I look to provide the service of creating this layout, so that I could enter the text, details and photos?

The other part of this question is concerning the title. Is there a better title that I can use that does not involve accomplishments, reflections, or a "look back"?

Thank you for your help!

Best practices for a plaintext resume

marble — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 16:44:33 -0800

Best practices for formatting a plaintext resume? I am going to apply for a job where I have to paste my resume into a form, and I'd like to have it not look terrible. I saw this related askme thread which has some good ideas, but I have a couple of additional questions.

Should I do hard returns at 80 columns? I just wonder how likely it will be that when viewed in a variable-width font the lines will be too short.

It's hard to keep it to one page if the "page" is not really defined, but I can write it in Word to gauge the length I suppose.

I'd like to indent some parts and maybe use a horizontal rule line out of ----------- or _________ or ==========. Is that a terrible idea, or used carefully (and sparingly) could it be ok?

I plan to also host a pdf version of my resume (and list the url in my pasted-into-form resume, prominently, at the top), and maybe also a html version. Any other formats I should use? Word document maybe?

And in general, do you have any tips / best practices? Things to avoid?

Thanks in advance for any help.

How do I save to a text file in Excel 2011?

bluefly — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 07:22:42 -0800

I'm on a mac. A colleague sent me an Excel file (.xls) which I looked at in Excel 2011. It looks fine. I would like to save the file in some sort of text format, so that I can open Terminal and look at it in less. I realize that the columns won't align nicely, that's fine. What I don't want are all the weird characters that show up (from differently formatted line endings, etc). I've tried saving as "Tab delimited text," but that has the problem with the line endings. Which format should I use?

What filesystem should I use to share between windows mac and linux?

metaBugs — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 03:34:58 -0800

I have a 1TB external hard drive that I want to use with Linux, Mac & Windows 7. What filesystem should I format it with? My SO has a Mac which is her primary tool for work. It's set up the way she likes and needs it, and introducing any bugs or other screwups that impede her work would be pretty disastrous at the moment. So we're very reluctant to install or modify any software on that machine. I have a kubuntu Linux machine which I'm happy to install new stuff on and, on the same machine, I have a Windows 7 install that I can fiddle with.

The drive itself will mostly be used to store media and backups, but with a couple of large files (e.g. some very large data sets and a 50gb truecrypt vault).

From reading around, it looks like my best options are:
NTFS -- Might require installing something to the Mac?
HFS -- I need commercial software to let Windows see it, and have no idea how well that'll work
exFAT -- The linux support I've seen tends to be labelled "experimental" or "beta", which makes me a bit twitchy when talking about a drive that'll be holding my backups. Perhaps importantly, it seems to be designed for flash drives; my HDD is not a flash drive.

What filesystem(s) would you suggest for Linux, Mac and Windows? What pros/cons of the filesystems am I missing? Should we just give it all up and go back to wax tablets?

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft

b33j — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 17:43:30 -0800

Tell me about document control for the beginner, without specialist software? I've been working on a series of documents that work together - Chapters if you like, that add up to over 2000 pages. There are multiple authors and contributors. I'm supposed to be the formatter, but some of the issues that have arisen which require me to format and reformat are:

The documents are not complete when I first receive them, but the approving (external) organisation needs to see them at various stages so I can't wait until they are done to format them.

The figures (over 200, spread over 26 chapters and 20 appendices) can change name. They are produced in PDF form and added into the Word document at the end. Last Thursday, I asked permission to, and performed a check and it turned out that at least 10% of them had a different name to that referred to in the text. At the point, someone else noticed that the font sizes in the diagrams were not consistent, nor the margins, and this needs to be straightened out (but not by me, unfortunately) before the documents can be completed.

There are a series of conventions or styles, such as a space after numbers and before unit types, spelling of words that have two acceptable spellings, scientific terms and so on, that I have picked up as I've worked through and gone back and fixed in the documents I thought were finished. There may be other inconsistencies, but how do I know what they are?

There needs to be an overall contents page, and yes, I know supposedly Word does a Master document thing, and will work from that (supposedly), so I copy the contents pages from each of the docs, and paste it into a spreadsheet, so I can recreate an overall contents page, but then the document changes again. I can never be certain it is finished.

As the documents are being written, various authors need to refer to figures in separate documents. As these names change, it's possible there's errors in these references.

Sometimes an "editor" who has knowledge about the topic, but not about style conventions will correct what they think is an issue (e.g. placing semi colons at the end of dot points, when the document style agreed on does not use this convention) and I will have to go through and re-correct this.

Sometimes a decision is made about a convention (changing the placement of tables from left to centred) and I won't be told, and when I next fix the document, I will re-correct incorrectly.

I suspect it's way too late in the creation of this document to do anything useful in terms of consistency (but if there is, please tell me!), but in future, what can I do, or suggest to the project manager, to make this process better all ways around.

I can write complex(ish) Access databases, if a database is the way to go.

How do I thank multiple interviewers for a single position?

Groovytimes — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:07:52 -0800

I want to send a post-interview thank you email but I am a little unclear as to the best way of going about it. I had five 30 minute sessions with one to two employees each; the last session was with the head of the group I'd be working for. Should I send one email to all employees, an email to each session group, an email to only the senior interviewers (3 people), or some other iteration?

Help Me Restore My Blog Layout

Quisp Lover — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 10:15:36 -0800

I screwed up my (Blogger) blog settings and lost my layout. Trying to get back to the classic appearance, I went into "Template" and clicked "revert to classic". But I lost all my customization (including a long side panel of selected recommended articles), in addition to my font settings and stuff. And it looks like Internet Archive doesn't save blogs, so I have no way of rebuilding the data.

Help!

How do I restore a laptop hard drive to factory settings through my desktop?

New England Cultist — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:09:25 -0800

How do I restore a laptop hard drive to factory settings through my desktop? I have a laptop hard drive (HP Pav Dv5) that I want to format via my desktop. My reasons for doing this is that the laptop has pulled a funky and won't boot. I think the bios is corrupt; I slipstreamed XP onto it shortly after buying it with VISTA pre-loaded.

The hard drive is partitioned into C and D, with the latter containing the image file that restores the drive back to factory settings.

This is Ms Cultist's old laptop. She now uses a Mac, but I'd like to have a go at fixing this one, if only to use as a back-up. I have removed the drive from the laptop and am accessing it via usb on the desktop.

How do I reformat the C drive using the image file on D via the desktop, without potentially making the desktop drives unstable? I'm a fairly old hand at formatting, but I've never loaded an OS onto an external drive in this way.

MS Word: chapters and subheadings

imposster — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 06:57:32 -0800

Microsoft Word with chapters and numbered subsections: I was a good boy and wrote my dissertation draft with well-organized hierarchical headings. Now that I am going back to fine-tune the format, the numbering has gone completely haywire, the spacing is off, and I am literally pulling out my hair trying to fix it. I don't even know where to look for help. Heading 1 is my chapter title. For some reason, the numbering doesn't work so that Ch. 2 still reads as 1. Chapter 3 reads as Ch. 2. If I manually set the numbering to begin at 2, it doesn't affect the sub-headings. Heading two is for the subsections. The numbering is set to continue from previous section, but I don't get 2.1, 2.2 etc., it acts as if the previous ch. is where it is continuing from. So Chapter 2, subsection 1.6, 1.7. I can manually set this to restart at 1 (1.1) but I can't get it to manually bet 2.1.

In the meantime, the spacing as gone wonky such that there is not enough space between the sub-headings and the paragraph below. And to top it off, in Chapter 5, all of the normal text is stuck in Heading 2 style and I can't get it out (even when I tried to start over from an unformatted earlier copy).

Any help or suggestions on where to get help are greatly appreciated.

How do I commission a logo?

Doofus Magoo — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:12:23 -0800

How do I hire a graphics person to make a small logo? I coach a merry little band of chuckleheads who are going to be banding together to play some soccer tournaments this year, and we need a small logo created for our uniforms. I created the logo we used last year from an SVG I found online, but I would like something a little more professional this year. How would I go about hiring someone to do this, and what could I expect to pay?

Is there anything in the graphic design/logo/whatever world equivalent to rentacoder.com, where I could post the job and have people bid on the job, perhaps by providing samples, and I select the one I like best and hire them? Would Jobs or craigslist be viable options? If I were to go either of those routes, would posting it as "send me a sample of what you propose in low-res format" be a reasonable request?

When I commission the artwork, what format(s) should I request the finished product in so that we can get the most of it down the road? SVG?

Normally in a job like this this, do I (the client) get full rights to the final product, so that if we wanted to use it again down the line for something else, or tweak it, or whatever, we would be free to do so?

Word 2004 to Word 2011

greta simone — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:54:56 -0800

Switching from Word for Mac 2004 to Word for Mac 2011. Formatting and compatibility issues. Really truly clueless. Help? So I got a new MacBook Pro (Oct 2011), and currently have the trial version of Word (Office) for Mac 2011. I transferred all my documents from my old hard drive (MacBook 2007), which were saved as .doc’s in Office 2004. These are my issues:

--When opening up my 2004 documents in 2011, they open up in a .doc ‘compatability mode’. Everything looks normal and fine on my end, but after sending that document to a friend, the formatting is all screwed up on her end. The friend I sent it to is using the same 2004 of Word that I used to have. She is seeing lines where I don’t see lines on my end (this is a resumè I’m editing).

--So I tried to copy and paste it into a new 2011 document. I saved it as a .docx (when I tried to save it as just a .doc it said that that’s the same as compatibility mode). After sending that to the aforementioned friend, she opened it to find that it was totally blank, where obviously on my end it was not.

--So WTF do I do here? This is for the process of resumè and cover letter submissions, so I can’t just use google docs or cut and paste into the body of an email (I am mostly instructed to submit my resumè and cover letter as attachments).

And lastly, is it an acceptable practice to email pdf versions of resumès and cover letters when applying for a job? Or should it absolutely be a .doc or some version? Maybe I can try making pdfs?

It might be worth noting that I work in a field that tends to be underfunded, so it’s probably safe to assume that the people I’m emailing don’t necessarily have the most up-to-date software.

Thanks for you help, and apologies if I sound like a complete fool.

Automatic PowerPoint Formatting Approaches?

Alterscape — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:32:21 -0800

I need to automate the format of outline-based information into slide presentations, given some simple rules. I can code. I have some ideas. What options am I missing? I have been asked to help streamline the process of creating a certain text-heavy deliverable. The client creates a text outline and enters it into a set of very specifically formatted PowerPoint slides in a currently-labor-intensive process. The client would like to have the slides generated automatically from the outline, subject to some relatively simple rules about when to split content onto a 2nd slide, what info to include in the heading of that 2nd slide, etc. PowerPoint is not an absolute requirement, PDF slide output using a fairly specific template is. A few ideas I'm considering:

LaTeX + Beamer, with a preprocessor to convert an outline into proper TeX markup. Pro: simple-ish, no temptation to manually edit the output. Con: difficult to edit later if you have to, assuming your end user is PowerPoint fluent and doesn't want to bother with TeX.

PowerPoint + Apache POI + a preprocessor. Pro: I already know the API; output would still be editable. Con: POI's functions for creating presentations are a bit buggy; capability to edit the output = temptation to edit the output.

Anything I'm missing? I'd rather avoid VBScript if I can, and I'm not a .net guy, so I'm worried about writing an Office plugin even though it's certainly one potential route. I know I'm kind of handwaving the format of the outline -- as long as it's usable and I can get data out of it, there's no specific requirement there.

Conditional formatting (?): How to bold all text that comes before a colon

lovableiago — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:42:58 -0800

Is there a way to make all text at the beginning of a line, preceding a colon, BOLD in Microsoft Word? Sorry, I did check Google and the Microsoft site first and neither are yielding any results for this (shocker).

So, say you are putting together a glossary (a long one)that is set up like this:

Term: definition etc.

But you want it to look like:

Term: definition etc.

Of course I could go through and manually make each term bold (and yes, I realize I should have done this as I went along but I initially thought I'd be doing this whole thing differently so I didn't bother), but I'd really like to know if there is a shortcut because 1) I am working with A LOT of terms and it could take a while, and 2) I think that this is something that could really come in handy for me in the future anyway. Effectively, it would be some sort of command that tells the computer "Make any text that precedes a colon bold" (for the current document, it wouldn't even have to specify "at the beginning of the line" as I said in my original question, because here there aren't colons anywhere else).

Can't even conceive of how this would be done with Find/Replace, although that is essentially what I'd be doing. Is this the job for a macro?? I know virtually nothing about how those work but it seems like the truly skilled MS Word users can always do magical things with macros.

Any help is appreciated and more details can be provided if needed!

Make Excel stop babysitting me.

ootandaboot — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:11:21 -0800

Excel is treating me like a child because it thinks I can't tell the difference between .csv and .xlsx. It's wasting my time. Help? Whenever I save an Excel (2011 for Mac, Leopard) spreadsheet in a format other than .xlsx, such as .csv or .txt, it gives me the following warning:

"This workbook contains features that will not work or may be removed if you save it in the selected file format. Do you want to continue?... plus more fine print"

This happens every time I reflexively hit command-s as I work, and it happens when I close the file even if I've *just* saved it. Worse, the response button that's highlighted is "Cancel" so I can't just hit return to get through the warning -- I have to pick my mouse up to deal with it.

This has been irritating me for a while, but I don't use Excel that often so I was never driven to try to fix it. Right now I'm using it a lot more and I'm up against a big deadline, and this is getting in the way of being able to work efficiently. How do I convince Excel that I'm already very well aware of the nature of .csv and .txt files (that's why I'm saving files in those formats!), I'm keeping track of which files are in which format, and I do not need or want to be warned every single time? Please help me!

Readability for PDFs?

bluefly — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 11:27:12 -0800

I have to read a lot of academic papers. They are usually formatted into 2 columns per page. This is fine if I print them out, but when I read them on a computer screen, it is difficult/annoying for me to scroll up and down - I lose my place easily (I recognize this may be unusual). Is there software out there that will strip the text from a pdf into one column (and maybe put all the figures at the end or somewhere)? Like the Readability extension for text on the web, but for pdfs. Maybe a plugin for Adobe Acrobat? Linux or Windows, please. Thanks.

Format Hard Drive

Noodles — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:44:02 -0800

I have a laptop that I want to sell. How do I format the hard drive but still keep the OS system. I don't have any software disk or floppy. I want to the computer to be like when I opened it the first day. Thanks

OSX Startup Disc old computer transfers

JJkiss — Thu, 26 May 2011 12:05:13 -0800

Can i use the OSX startup disc option to 'move stuff from old computer' more than once? I want to put old imac and old laptop all on my new laptop. I have already used the 'sync old computer' option for transferring all my stuff from my old laptop to my new laptop. Can I use that same option somehow to put all my imac stuff onto new laptop just as seamlessly? It would not be as convenient to transfer the files manually.

Exe to avi or other video format?

kal0kagathia — Wed, 25 May 2011 10:16:40 -0800

Where can I find software that will convert a video in .exe into an actual video format like avi...etc? Our office keeps receiving law enforment videos in .exe format that are not compatible with our transcription software. Any help is appreciated! Please be gentle with my post as I've been a longtime MeFi lurker and this is my first post of any kind.

Yelling at the Premiere

monocultured — Sat, 21 May 2011 12:10:51 -0800

I'm trying to edit the video shot with my Nikon P7000 in Adobe Premiere 5.03, but I get what looks like keyframe issues at the editing stage, rendered or not. iMovie doesn't have the same issue, but I have severe issues with iMovie. Please advise. I've pulled the same video clips into Premiere and iMovie, with different results. Screencapture: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8045748/Premiere_woes.mov

The videos I get from P7000 are 720p @ 23.976fps, and that is what my sequence in Premiere is set to. The video format is H.264.

One of these days I'll get around to learning iMovie for the small projects, but this is not one of those. Hlep!

Should I have any longevity concerns about .epub files?

Joe Beese — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 08:46:00 -0800

Should I have any longevity concerns about .epub files? For example, the University of Texas Digital Repository strongly encourages submissions in formats that have:

- open documentation

- support across a range of software platforms

- wide adoption

- no compression (or lossless compression)

- no embedded files or embedded programs/scripts

- non-proprietary specifications

It then recommends .pdf, .odt, .txt, and .xml as having many or all of these. It does not mention .epub - which I had thought was 6 for 6.

So: what are the odds that future e-readers will stop supporting that format - thus requiring .epub files to be converted to whatever is the standard then?

And - with the proviso that my .epub files were either DRM-free to begin with or... were made so - what are the odds that such a conversion would be difficult or impossible to perform at that time?

How to recover files after I have formatted my computer?

omaralarifi — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 10:43:14 -0800

How to recover files after I have formatted my computer c: drive? I have windows ultimate 64 bit. Thanks