Useful PowerPoint Shit, Part 2 - Cloning objects quickly

I don't like using the mouse, but if I have to I will. Here's some tips for quickly cloning items in PowerPoint:

1. Duplicating a shape - Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V OR Ctrl+D (while not in text edit mode) OR Ctrl+Mouse drag
2. Duplicating a slide - Ctrl+Shift+D

Here's the keyboard reference for Microsoft PowerPoint.

Useful PowerPoint Shit, Part 1 - Copying and Pasting Shape Attributes

I love using hotkeys to execute my tasks because they reduce the number of times my hand has to leave the keyboard and go for the mouse, and consequently accelerate the task at hand. I've recently had cause to start using PowerPoint a lot more as my role at the company where I work has shifted and my job description has changed somewhat.

That said, I've discovered this useful gem for copying attributes between shapes so that I don't have to use the mouse and navigate menus to clone items or otherwise search for paste options:

Copy the attributes of a shape

1. Select the shape with the attributes that you want to copy. ...
2. Press CTRL+SHIFT+C to copy the shape attributes.
3. Press the TAB key or SHIFT+TAB to select the shape or object that you want to copy the attributes to.
4. Press CTRL+SHIFT+V.

Here's the keyboard reference for Microsoft PowerPoint.

Cool MySQL tricks

It's been a while since I've written a blog post, and I figured this was a good topic to write about. For the most part, I don't use SQL. There's numerous ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tools and frameworks out there (ie Hibernate) that abstract away all the boiler-plate CRUD code. When I do have to use SQL (be it on the command line or with a query browser), I'm not afraid to dive right in, and it's interesting to learn new things about SQL because there's so much to learn and it's such a ridiculously powerful query language.

I had to update the configuration in one of my databases, but the configuration required inserting numerous new lines into a table for user roles. I could've written a stored procedure to do it, but given my (admittedly somewhat limited) knowledge of SQL, I figured this would take too much time and I didn't want to do it. (This is what I like to call constructive laziness). I kept Googling and found MySQL's INSERT INTO ... SELECT syntax, which allows you to conveniently insert the results of one query into another table. I'm sure that most other database implementations out there have a similar convenience syntax, but I happen to work with MySQL so there you go. It took what would've been a numerous line script with looping and separate SELECT and INSERT statements down to a one liner. If you use MySQL (especially with LAMP / AJAX) I recommend that you read about it.