Kiran Upadhyay

There are conflicting ideas about how hard it is to make use of Microsoft Access. One school of thought suggests that it’s difficult, complex, and beyond normal folk. The other is that it’s just as easy to use as Excel. I’m here to tell you the truth. And it sits somewhere between the two. Access takes more effort to become familiar with than a spreadsheet, but it’s not difficult, and it’s very powerful. You can start right here. After this introductory article, I’ll follow up with posts on the various parts that make up Access, and show you how to save time and effort. Starting at the beginning First up, a little boring theory. I’ll make it as fast as I can, and hopefully it won’t hurt too much. Microsoft Access is an RDBMS (Relational Database Management System). It’s often called a database, that that term actually refers to the information you keep in it. It’s like the difference between a particular spreadsheet and Excel itself. As an RDBMS goes, Access is decidedly at the

The number of How-To’s we write here at MakeUuseOf is simply staggering. Each of them requires a huge amount of research before it is ready for publication. It’s quite a challenge to break down the information and present it to our readers in a clear, lucid manner. And we understand that many fellow bloggers face the same problem everyday. So we decided that we’ll let you in on the secret to our prowess with How-To’s. Once you’ve decided what to write about, you need to make sure that you use the correct set of tools to express your idea to the readers. This includes tools to research the topic, to take screenshots, record screencasts, etc. You also need to make sure that your how-to is valid and doesn’t contain any mistakes. You can use the following set of awesome tools to get all those aspects in order. Research Tools Google: The Grand-daddy of Research You may have the best idea for a how-to, but there’s really no point to it unless you can back it up with material that is acc

One of the great features of digital photography is the ability to convert color images to black-and-white, or what some photographers call monochrome conversion. There’s little or no need to shoot digital photos in black-and-white when color images can easily be converted to black-and-white in Photoshop or a similar image editor. In this article, I’ll offer some black and white photography tips for Photoshop users. So why would you want to convert an image to black-and-white? Well it’s pretty much an aesthetic decision. For me, I might convert to black-and-white because it conveys the mood of the subject I‘m shooting. This is the case for the image I use in this tutorial. Other times, the colors in an image simply might conflict with one another and distract from the focus of the image, so converting to black-and-white gets rid of the distracting color conflicts. In some images, black-and-white conversion just has more aesthetic appeal. There’s no rule or equation you can apply to

The other day I was writing an article about worldwide car industry trends. I turned immediately to my trusty research tool Google Trends to find the top Internet searches on the car industry. However as I was conducting my usual keyword research, I noticed a small, obscure link at the bottom of the search page that read “ explore advanced features with Google Insights for Search .” When I clicked on it, I discovered a Google tool that I’ve been craving for a very, very long time. What Google Trends failed to do in providing greater breakdown of the demographics for various web searches – including regional, time frame and search term research within specific categories – Google Insights now offers. For anyone interested in creating an SEO campaign focused on the top Internet searches for their particular niche, this is the go-to tool of the day. Use Google Insights To Uncover Your Top Internet Searches Here on MakeUseOf, we’ve covered an assortment of methods you can use to iden

Twitter is designed to be streamlined and only have the essential features, but for many people the built-in features are not enough and third-party applications have therefore been developed to make Twitter easier to use and add more options. One of the most sought-after abilities is to schedule Twitter updates. There are many web tools and applications out there that work with Twitter, but not all are created equal. In this article I will discuss the best tools I’ve tried for scheduling Twitter updates and we’ll take a quick look at the other features they offer too. Just the Schedule, Please To start we’ll look at services that directly provide what we want – the ability to schedule twitter updates. After that we’ll review some of the more full-featured applications. Twuffer Twuffer is one of my favorites to schedule Twitter updates. In my tests it was the easiest and fastest to use for scheduling a tweet. For me, it’s a big bonus that it doesn’t require me to sign up for a Twu

We all listen to music. Some of us listen to our music on the go on our iPods or Windows Mobile devices. But when we are in front of a computer jamming out while working, what do you use? I have used Windows Media Player (but I will show you some good iTunes visuals as well below) on my computers for years and years. I have also found an invaluable resource for downloading Windows Media visuals that react to the music within Windows Media Player. They look a little something like this: You can visit this site provided by Microsoft here . When you arrive you will see a list of Windows Media visuals to add to your collection. It looks like this: Everything to download is free. The first one on the list that says featured visualization (WhiteCap) is a PC or Mac visualization application which is only a trial. The rest seem to be freebies. I will run through how to use them. It is very simple – locate the download link next to the visualization you would like to have. This is what