Friedbeef’s Tech

What’s simplest way to stop an Excel sheet or workbook from being modified?  Just protect it with a password.  While this is great for stopping others from accidentally modifying certain sections of your Excel file, it certainly isn’t the safest way to lock up private data for the simple reason that it’s very easy to crack!

If you’re ever in a situation where you need instant legitimate access to a locked file, just download and run this Excel Add On.  Then just open up the file in question and you can unlock the workbook or any worksheets within it. 

Useful to note is that it doesn’t reveal the password, or brute hack it - what it does is just simply remove the entire password from the file altogether. 

Also, the program can’t remove file protection, i.e. if you are unable to open the excel file to begin with, this program won’t help you. You can however try Excel Key (this one is not free) to remove file protection.

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From quick traditional ways, to groundbreaking methods that will blow your mind, here are 5 of the best ways to resize your images.

1. Web-based Intelligent Resizing

The most common ways of image resizing - cropping and basic shrinking/enlarging usually ends up with compromised results - in the form of pictures which are either distorted or eliminate detail. 

rsizr is a web-tool which scans the picture for ‘important’ sections and allows you to manipulate the size of the image by just resizing the picture’s ‘unimportant’ sections. 

See the video below to get a better idea of this awesome technology.  The results are simply amazing. 

2. GIMP Plugin which is aware of your content

If you liked the rsizr technolgy described above and want a desktop version of it…  Try out the Liquid Rescale plugin for GIMP (The open source version of Photoshop).  This will allow you to take the editing offline and is perfect for heavier users.

3. Resize Multiple Images With a Right-Click

Microsoft calls them Power Toys - I call them features which should have been integrated into Windows XP by default. 

Image Resizer is a free piece of software from Microsoft, which helps you resize one or more files from a right click menu directly in Windows Explorer.  This Power Toy only works on XP, and not Vista.

4. The fastest way to create thumbnails

Quick Thumbnail is an online image resizer which bills itself as the fastest way to resize images online.  What I really liked about this service was that you could:

• Either specify a picture or URL
• Resize it to common sizes based on different usage (icon, avatar, banner, full monitor resolution etc.)
• Simultaneously create multiple resized images on the spot (useful when testing various sizes).

5. Change normal images into vector format

One of the biggest advantages vector images have over other file types is the fact that they do NOT distort when resized.  Here’s a good example of what happens when you zoom into a vector image.

Stanford University has recently released a free tool that will actually convert typical images into vector format!  Works best with items without too many gradient colors like photos for example (Still looks great though - but the converted image doesn’t look ‘photo-like’).

Perfect for logos, scanned signatures, or anything which needs to be different sizes at different times.

How do you resize your images?  Let us know in the comments!

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